Barry needed out of the condo, so he took Jenny for breakfast while Steph and Troy went off on their own. I was left alone with Mom and Grandma Bernice. I wasn’t sure that Grandma Bernice realized anyone except Mom was still there because she bathed with the bathroom door wide open. Mom had gone inside, sitting on the toilet. She must’ve thought I’d left with everyone else, too, because they had a deep conversation while I listened from the living room.
“We might be leaving after the weekend,” Mom said.
“That was fast.”
“This was just a stopover.”
“Judy, I don’t have the patience to noodge. Like knowing whether or not the kids are even in school anymore.”
“We took them out of school in Jersey.”
“Oy vey, and you plan on just driving around?”
“Barry has family in California.”
“Oh, so I’m not good enough family. I see.”
“Ma—we’re in your hair here, I can tell.”
“Hand me a towel.”
I heard splashing, feet patting against the floor, a drip-drip from Grandma Bernice’s body. She used the wall as support as she walked out in a towel, Mom following into the bedroom. The door wide open.
“And what does Barry plan on doing for work?” Grandma Bernice asked, flinging off her towel and giving me a show. I looked away but had the ingrained image of her wrinkled tits seared into my brain.
“He has a plan.”
“Sekhel, Judy. You need to have common sense. He’s a schmuck. A schmuck of all schmucks. A knock-off watch. Gold that turns green. A fugazi.”
“Ma, where did you learn that word?”
“First time I saw him, hair everywhere with curls like a clown, a young Elliott Gould, I thought—oy-oy-oy. This nudnik she chooses? You could’ve had a nice doctor, a stable man. Herb was not the best-looking of men out there; that’s why I chose him. ‘He’ll be good to me,’ I said, yes. It’s the good-looking ones you need to worry about, the Barrys of the world, who think they are owed something. Herb, he made money honestly, a tailor, a fine profession, especially back then. It’s how I learned to survive by sewing after he passed.”
“Barry made his money honestly.”
“If you say so…”
“Wait, Ma, what are you implying?”
“The house you lived in, the clothes you wore, that’s not just from his salary.”
“He invested well.”
“If you say so…”
“Stop saying that!”
“I’ve said many brachots for him, for your whole family, especially after what I overheard once when he was on the phone.”
Mom’s voice dropped. “What did you overhear?”
“When I stayed with you. He was talking on that giant phone with the antennae. To a man. Mr. Bianchi. An I-talian.”
“What does him being Italian have to do with anything?”
Grandma Bernice wrapped herself in a caftan and then her head in a scarf like a rich cancer patient.
“You know.”
She was either winking, or something had gotten stuck in her eye.
“Mob,” she whispered, as if she was being wiretapped.
Mom let out a chortle. “Ma, that’s ridiculous.”
“I was fermisht. He owed this Mr. Bianchi money. He kept saying, ‘I’ll have the money for you.’ Real panic in his voice.”
“Ma, Barry’s a stockbroker. It probably had to do with an investment.”
“No, no, this man was a gonif. Barry was saying, ‘Don’t do anything rash.’”
Mom pinched the bridge of her nose, a headache forming like usual around Grandma Bernice. “Again, Ma, that could be about an investment.”
“When he got off the phone, I asked him if anything was wrong. He acted like it was gornisht, nothing. Tried to change the subject. Asked how my sewing was going—I think I was making mittens for Jenny, like he would care about that. Your husband’s always been a macher, scheming with a side hustle.”
“Barry has no side hustle.”
“Oh really? So, on that same trip, I’m reading your local newspaper, and who gets mentioned but a Gianni Bianchi involved in some racketeering conspiracy.”
“There must be a million people in Jersey with the last name Bianchi.”
“Wake up, Judith, your husband has mob ties!”
This was when Mom walked out of the bedroom in a huff, nearly running into me.
“Oh, Aaron, I thought you had gone—”
Grandma Bernice came charging out. “You can leave him. We’ll change the locks. The kids could go to school in Florida.”
My ears perked up at that. A wild fantasy entered my mind of being at the same school as Heidi, holding hands in the hallways, making out by our lockers, her watching me play basketball from the bleachers as I landed a jump shot.
“You never gave Barry a shot,” Mom said, swiveling around with an accusatory finger in Grandma Bernice’s face.
“You weren’t yourself when you met him. Your father—God bless him—had just died. I couldn’t control you. And he swooped in. He took advantage.”
“We fell in love.”
“You fell in lust. There’s a difference.”
“We made three beautiful children.”
Grandma Bernice gave a look that said The jury’s still out on that.
“The truth is, Ma, you joined this Orthodox cult, and I wasn’t good enough for you anymore. Nothing I would’ve done, save joining myself, would’ve been sufficient.”
Without her makeup on, Grandma Bernice looked like a cadaver. She was speechless, maybe for the first time in her life.
“Dad is the best Dad there is,” I said, piping up. Grandma Bernice held onto her heart in shock. She clearly hadn’t seen me there. “It’s not okay for you to talk bad about him.”
I felt Mom put her hand on my shoulder and give a light squeeze that told me to continue.
“He wants only the best for us,” I continued, as if I was convincing myself. “He goes out of his way to give us everything we want. You’re just old and jealous because you have no one.”
“You chaya, how dare you speak to your grandmother like that.”
“That’s why you fill your place up with cats,” I said, kicking one aside that tried to curl around my leg. “They’re the only things that will put up with you.”
“Okay, Aaron, thank you,” Mom whispered into my ear and gave me a little push away. “Ma,” she said, because Grandma Bernice was quivering. For a second, I worried I’d given the woman a heart attack. “Ma, he didn’t mean that.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Aaron!” Mom said, but I knew she wasn’t angry.
“I’m sorry, Grandma Bernice,” I said, twisting my toe into the ground.
“In my time, we respected our elders,” she said as Mom led her over to a chair. She took a big gulp of a breath as she sat down. “My meds,” she said, pointing to a side table.
“Do you need water?”
Grandma Bernice shook her head and swallowed them whole. Impressive.
“You can’t talk like that about a boy’s father,” Mom said. “Barry’s on a pedestal.”
“This will not end well.”
Mom chuckled. “What do you mean?”
“Your RV excursion, whatever it is you have planned,” she hissed and then spit up into a tissue curled into her sleeve. “If you don’t leave him now—”
“Ma, stop that!”
“You’ll have turned your back on God for good,” Grandma Bernice said. “That’s what I foresee. There’ll be no chance of finding Him again.”
Mom glanced at me and spun her finger around her ear to indicate that Grandma was crazy.
“Go on, make fun of your alter kaker mother. You have the power to save the rest of your family, and you still choose lust with that shlimazel. Only a tragedy will get you to see I’m right.”
“Fine, you can say, ‘I told you so’ then.”
“I don’t have to, I’m telling you now.”
Mom grabbed my arm and yanked me toward the front door. We could hear Grandma Bernice carrying on about a meesa machee af deer that would visit us, which I gleaned was some type of curse. Then she coughed up a pool of phlegm. Outside, Johnny Cash was barking in the RV. Mom lit a cigarette she pulled from her jeans pocket, the pack crumpled. She inhaled like it was the only thing keeping her sane.
“She’s wrong,” she said, shaking now like Grandma Bernice was earlier.
“I know.”
“She deserved what you said to her, even though it wasn’t nice.”
“I didn’t like the way she was talking about Dad.”
I made a signal for her to hand me a cigarette. She shrugged like she’d given up and passed one over, lit it hesitantly. We puffed together. She laughed, but it was hollow sounding, as if the laugh was masking something much worse.
“We’re not cursed,” she said quietly. I wasn’t sure if she was only telling it to herself.
“No, definitely not.”
“We’re not,” she said again, and this time, I knew it was Hashem she was speaking to.
We waited for a sign from Him, but on a hot Florida day, there wasn’t even a breeze, no answer, so we kept smoking down to the filters, and I hugged her hip.
“I think I need to take a walk,” she said.
“All right—”
“Myself,” she said, giving a slight bow like she was apologizing, backing away and then turning around. I was losing her, she was losing it, the Mom I knew—lost.
In my mind, a big score would bring her back.
Yes, that was all she needed.