THE PROJECT TODAY was making Christmas tree ornaments using clear plastic balls that could be filled with glitter, water, and glue to create snow globes. Amanda had seen the idea on the Internet, and past experience had taught her that anything using glitter was a huge hit with the residents. She’d set up the table with the supplies, and was helping those who needed assistance, when one of the newer residents came over to the table.
“Oh. Tree ornaments.” She sounded sad.
Amanda smiled at the woman, who wore a pretty flowered housecoat and had carefully styled her short gray curls with a cute matching headband. “Hi. I’m Amanda. We haven’t met yet. Would you like to do a craft?”
“Well,” the woman said with a wave of one gnarled hand, “I suppose, but I haven’t anyone to give a tree ornament to.”
“You could put it on the main tree,” offered Betty from her place at the end of the table. “They never have enough decorations on it.”
“I could.” The woman smiled, but still looked a little sad.
“I have some felt menorah kits,” Amanda offered. “I was going to drop them off at the Temple Beth Shalom synagogue for their preschool. It’s just putting the different pieces in these little bags. If you’d rather help me assemble them?”
The woman brightened and took a seat at the table. “Oh! Yes, I think that would be lovely, thank you. I’m Norma, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Norma.” Amanda laid out the pieces for the kits and showed her how to put them together.
The group worked for a while, the residents chatting and joking with each other. Amanda had known most of them for a few years, so it was no surprise when Betty nudged Wanda with an elbow and then lifted her chin toward her with a grin. Amanda started laughing even before the older woman spoke.
“No,” she said before Betty could even ask. “No, not yet.”
It was a question they asked her frequently enough that she could no longer be sad that the answer was still negative. She caught Norma giving her a curious glance. Amanda shook her head and sorted out the nine multicolored felt candles, one for each of Chanukah’s eight nights, plus the shamash, the helper candle. She added the yellow fabric flames to the piles.
“They want to know if I have a boyfriend,” she explained. “And sadly, or maybe not so sadly, I do not.”
Norma nodded and gave the other women a small smile as she added her pieces to one of the bags and tied a careful bow around it. “You’re young still. You have time.”
Betty sighed and strung a ribbon through the metal hook of her plastic ball. “That’s what we all think, isn’t it?”
“No prospects at all?” Wanda leaned closer, hands folded on the table. “What about that nice young man you told us walked you home on Friday?”
Amanda’s brows rose. “Ben? My neighbor Ben?”
“Yes, that was his name. The one you told us about when you came in on Saturday looking all aglow,” Betty added with a grin at her friend. “Didn’t she, Wanda?”
“He’s . . . my neighbor,” Amanda said, thinking of Ben and unable to quite put her finger on what, exactly, was odd about him. His mannerisms. There’d been heat in his gaze during those few seconds when he kept her from falling on the ice, but it passed so quickly she decided she must’ve imagined it. “He’s very polite.”
“Nothing wrong with polite,” Norma said.
There was more to it than that. Ben had an air of secrets about him that Amanda wasn’t sure she was meant to decipher. “His eyes are gorgeous.”
“Gorgeous eyes, there’s a start!” Wanda patted the table gently and beamed. “My Albert had lovely blue eyes.”
Amanda studied the felt pieces in front of her, trying not to think too hard about her mysterious new neighbor, but now that the older women had got her talking about him, it was like she couldn’t stop herself. “They’re brown. A dark, rich brown, like chocolate. Dark chocolate. Really yummy, delicious chocolate. And . . . he has a beard!”
Betty laughed with delight. “Oh, my!”
“I know, right?” Amanda sat back in the chair with a shake of her head. “I don’t usually go for that lumber-sexual look. But it’s sooooo attractive. I mean, seriously, strangely attractive. On him, it works.”
“Long hair?” Wanda asked. “A . . . whattya call it? A man bun?”
“No . . . he wears it super short. It’s dark, almost black.” Amanda sighed, thinking about it. “He’s very polite, did I mention that? Anyway, he’s my neighbor, and aside from a couple conversations in the hall and the time he came to my place to pick up his package—”
“Oh, ho!” Betty grinned and shook her finished ornament. “Hot cha-cha!”
Amanda burst into giggles. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Next time,” Wanda offered, “make him a coffee cake. Or, no. I guess you should offer him a beer. That’s what you kids do these days, isn’t it?”
“There is something about him,” Amanda admitted with a look around the table. Of all the residents she’d spent time with here at the nursing home, Betty and Wanda had been the closest to her. They’d unfailingly and cheerfully gone along with whatever wacky crafts she dreamed up, even the ones that ended up being awful. They wanted her to be happy, she thought, and that was never a bad thing for anyone to wish on someone else. “I can’t put my finger on it, but . . . yeah. There’s something there. But I don’t think he’s at all interested. Besides, I don’t want to try for something with my neighbor. I love my apartment, and he lives on the first floor. Imagine how awkward it will be when it ends and I have to pass his place every day. No, thanks.”
Norma let out a slow, soft chuckle. “So determined it will end?”
“Most things do,” Amanda said after a moment, not trying to be a bummer about it, but feeling like that was the truth. Every relationship she’d had, so far, had crashed and burned.
“Nonsense.” Norma settled the final menorah kit onto the pile she and Amanda had made, and tapped the soft fabric. “I was married for fifty-eight years. It only ended because he died.”
The matter-of-fact way Norma announced this left Amanda a little taken aback. “I’m sorry, Norma.”
“He would have died anyway,” she said, without so much as a break in her voice, giving Amanda a gaze as hard as steel. “But if I’d never agreed to go out on that first date with him, we would never have been married. Never had those sixty years together. So if you’re never going to allow something to start because you’re too afraid of it ending, I fear you will spend a very long time by yourself. If you want to see where a road will take you, dolly, you have to walk it.”
Amanda looked around the table. Everyone else was nodding. “But . . . he hasn’t even asked me out on a date, Norma.”
“Well my goodness!” Norma rapped her knuckles on the table. “Who says you have to wait for him to ask? “
WHEN THE PHONE rang, Ben almost didn’t answer it. He’d installed the landline in the apartment for emergencies. So far it had only rung about three times, each a sales call. He didn’t have an answering machine, though, which meant that if he didn’t pick up and the caller didn’t give up, he’d be listening to the harsh ringing until one of them gave in.
“Yeah?” he barked into the receiver.
“Benyamin?”
His stomach twisted. “Galya. Hi. I didn’t think . . . I wasn’t expecting you.”
Her soft breathing tickled his ear through the phone until he had to switch the handset to his other ear and scratch. She said nothing for so long he was sure she wasn’t going to, but neither of them was hanging up. He wasn’t going to be the first, that was for sure.
“I wanted to see how you were doing,” she said at last.
She sounded different. Tired, maybe. Sad? He hoped at least there was some small portion of grief in her voice, though it made him unhappy, too, imagining Galya as anything but the font of sunshine he’d always known her to be.
“I’m fine.”
She laughed, sounding a bit more like herself. “And if you weren’t? You wouldn’t tell me, would you?”
“I would tell you,” he answered, letting himself rest a hip against the edge of the half wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
“No. You wouldn’t. You forget, I know you.” They were both quiet again, for a shorter time now, before she spoke again. “Tell me about what you’re doing, Benyamin. I’ve been worried. We all have been.”
“Even my father?” He snorted disbelief.
Galya made a small noise. “You know he loves you very much. You’re his only son.”
“So, you’d think he might have been a little less of a . . .” Ben couldn’t bring himself to use an invective, even though he’d been trying out a few here and there on his own. But he couldn’t speak that way to Galya.
“Stubborn. Like father like son, maybe?”
Ben frowned and closed his eyes for a few seconds, thinking of the last time he’d seen his father. His mother had been crying. His sisters, too. His father had yelled himself red-faced, fists clenched. It was the first time Ben had ever feared his father would hit him—but in that moment, he’d been more afraid that he would have hit him back.
“Your mother has been worried,” Galya said when Ben didn’t answer.
“And yours?”
Galya sighed. “She’s angry, of course. Because she thinks—”
He knew exactly what Galya’s mother thought. The woman who’d been a second mother to him since childhood hated him for running out on her daughter just months before they were supposed to get married. He couldn’t blame her, or any of them. All they knew was that he’d betrayed Galya in one of the worst ways a man could.
They had no idea of the truth, and if Ben had his way, they never would. Because that was real love, he thought as he listened to the soft hush of Galya’s silence again. Sometimes it meant lying to protect the person you loved.
“How’s Levi?” he asked.
The smile was clear in her voice when she answered. “Oh . . . he’s good. Really good. He asked me to send his regards. And he wants you to come home.”
“I’m not coming home,” Ben said. “You know I can’t.”
“You can always come home.”
He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. “You know better.”
“How is it, where you are?” she asked him. “Out there, in the big wide world.”
“Harrisburg is hardly the big wide world. Not compared to Brooklyn.” But he knew what she meant. Their world, the one they’d shared since birth, was not so much small as it was . . . exclusive.
“Have you joined a shul?”
“No.”
Galya paused. “Will you?”
“No,” Ben said. “I told you before I left, I was leaving and not coming back.”
He hated to hear the strangled sob she didn’t even try to hide. “Benyamin—”
“I have to go. Thanks for calling. I’m fine. Everything here is fine. And you’re fine, you’re good, you and Levi are going to be wonderfully happy together.” Ben straightened, feeling a tightness in his jaw.
“Because of you!” she cried. “Please, don’t let us . . . don’t let what you did for us ruin your life! Please, I couldn’t bear it if I thought that. We talked about it, you said it was what you wanted, please, please, I can’t be happy if you’re not all right. And neither can he!”
Ben’s shoulders slumped. “You’re both going to be very happy, all right? I didn’t do anything that I didn’t think was the best choice for everyone, okay? You didn’t make me do anything, and Levi didn’t make me do anything, and neither did my father. I made my choices. You have to accept that.”
“You know I will always care for you so much,” Galya said.
It was not the first time she’d said those words to him, but Ben couldn’t bring himself to return the sentiment. It wasn’t that the words would’ve been a lie as much as a bandage, covering a wound that needed the open air in order to heal. “Good-bye, Galya.”
She hung up on him.
He didn’t blame her—he’d been unkind at the end, not to give her some scrap of affection. He’d meant what he told her. She hadn’t forced him to make any decisions; he’d done everything of his own free will. He could tell her that a million times, though, and she would still feel guilty about everything. He would never be able to change that, as much as it pained him.
He couldn’t stay in this apartment right now. There was nothing in it to keep him home, because nothing in it made him think of it as home. It was a place to sleep and eat, and he couldn’t even do that right now because he had no food.
Outside, he pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck and breathed in the crisp December air. It smelled different here than it had in Brooklyn. The sky had more stars. Harrisburg was officially a city, but such a small one that it felt more like he’d moved into the country. He wasn’t sure he liked it, not being able to hop the subway and head off to wherever he wanted. He needed to save for a car, he thought, and his job at Morningstar Mocha was not exactly going to lead to an overflowing bank account.
He might’ve made a mistake in picking Harrisburg, Ben thought as he headed down the sidewalk. Philadelphia had seemed too close to home, too easily reachable. The fact that there was a sizable Orthodox community in Harrisburg had meant something, as much as he wouldn’t have admitted it. Even though he’d told Galya he didn’t intend to join a synagogue, it still seemed impossible for him to live in a place where there wasn’t even the option. He hadn’t factored in the city’s rural setting or the lack of long-distance public transportation, and he hadn’t known that despite the Jewish communities centered in the city, there was very little public Jewish presence. Then again, wasn’t that what he’d wanted? he asked himself as he left the Valencia. He’d wanted to run away and make a new life, far away and very different from the old.