The Middlesteins Part 7

"I don't know, Dad. I don't know what's going on."

Richard motioned his head toward the door to the back room. It had never been painted, even after all these years, and a fake bra.s.s handle drooped half out of its socket. "Let's go in back and talk," he said. "Come on, kiddo."

Benny looked down, that loose, out-of-control feeling ranging around his gut again. Had he come here for advice? He was still angry with his father for leaving his mother when she was so sick, and he didn't understand how Richard had let her get that way in the first place. Rach.e.l.le had banned his father from their house months before. "He has nothing good to teach our children," is what she had said. Everything was falling apart because of this man. And yet, here he was, standing in front of him, about to spill his guts, looking for a little wisdom. Maybe, just maybe, he knew something Benny didn't.

Richard called Scotty to him-Scotty dragging his mop and bucket slowly down the aisle-and asked him to keep watch over the counter, and Scotty replied with a long and meaningful salute, as if he were a soldier in the delivery-boy army, followed by a quiet giggle to himself.

Benny followed his father into the back room, a dark, cobweb-ridden s.p.a.ce lined with rusted-out shelving units.

"What did the doctor say?" Richard peered at the prescription. "Dr. Harris, he's all right. You could do worse."

"Stress, probably," said Benny.

"That's a lot of stress." He motioned to Benny's hair and made a whoosh sound.

"Yeah, well, I am under a lot of stress, Dad, what with my parents getting divorced and my mother practically on her deathbed. How about you?" Benny was p.i.s.sed. Were they going to be coy suddenly? Were they going to pretend that the last few months hadn't happened?

His father turned from him and shuffled off between the shelving units, and didn't say anything, it turned icy quiet, spiders froze in their webs, and Benny could hear Scotty singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" through the door. Finally Richard returned, red-faced, with a pill bottle in hand. Benny waited for him to explode. Benny felt a delicious antic.i.p.ation take hold of him; he craved some sort of show of emotion from his grunting, withdrawn, disappointed father.

But Richard kept himself calm, handing his son the bottle, and then taking two steps back and rubbing his hands together, some imaginary dust flicking off onto the floor.

He said, "We make the decisions we make, Benny. We cannot take them back. I am not a perfect person." Benny watched as his father chose his words, plucked them from deep within his heart. "I can only tell you this: Your mother was making me crazy. Not normal crazy. Crazy crazy. Like it was going to kill me."

"How bad could it have been to spend the rest of your life with the mother of your children?" said Benny, surprised at his own calm. "She was loyal to you. And that should mean something."

"There was nothing left inside," said Richard. He took a few more steps back and leaned against the wall for support. "I was a bag of bones. There was nothing else in there. Whatever kept me standing, that was it, that was all that was left."

"You didn't put up a fight," said Benny.

"I'm trying to be respectful here, but have you not met your mother?" said Richard. "You can't fight her. You should know that by now."

That didn't sound right to Benny. Even if you can't fight, you should at least try to fight. He didn't know if he could fight his wife and win. They'd always gotten along so well; only recently had he begun to understand what kind of whirlwinds of power and aggression had lain dormant within her. He wondered briefly if he'd married someone like his mother, who, he had to admit, his father was right about; she was one tough cookie. But then he remembered that Rach.e.l.le was his pet.i.te princess, and how she was usually so calm, almost regal, most of the time, unlike his mother, who was boisterous and overflowing, and yes, Rach.e.l.le knew how to get what she wanted, just like his mother, but the similarities began and ended there.

He was relieved. It was not like he hadn't had this conversation with himself before, but every once in a while it was nice to remind yourself you had not turned into your worst nightmare, this man standing before him, who had just handed him a bottle full of pills intended to save his hair. He hadn't realized until that moment that being his father would be his worst nightmare, because his father had never been that person before, until he decided to be single and sixty and lonely, just him and Scotty hanging out in the fluorescent-lit pharmacy all day long, Scotty singing patriotic songs to Richard, the two of them waiting for the next old Jew to walk through the front door in search of Cardizem or hand cream or an enema. Benny and his father had hit the end of the line together; it was up to Benny to figure it, love, marriage, life, the universe, all of it out, by himself.

The two of them wandered uselessly out to the pharmacy; Benny would never step foot into that back room again until after his father had died a decade later, and there was no question that the business would be closed (it probably should have been closed five years before, but Richard had refused, saying that he offered a service to the community, though Benny knew that it was just because he needed a place to go all day), that the dusty shelves needed to be emptied and then tossed out the back door, a painful, clanking, depressing act that Benny, entirely bald by then, accomplished quietly, sadly, on his own.

But for now, the Propecia was on the house, and Richard walked Benny to the front door.

"So maybe I can come by sometime?" said Richard.

"I don't think so," said Benny. "Not yet. I'll work on it."

They stopped and stared at each other, and there were a million things of a confrontational nature that still hovered between them, but Benny wondered if they were worth the battle, and then decided they were not, or that his father wasn't worth it anyway, and he would deal with how sad that made him feel some other time.

Instead he said, "I always wondered something. Why do you carry so many kinds of enemas? Wouldn't just one kind do the trick?"

"You'd be surprised," said his father.

Dinner was something related to kale and beets. If he could have gotten back on the expressway and returned to his office and spent the night working, he would have. There was something so intensely satisfying about number crunching; he could almost feel the delicate little digits crumbling in his fist, piles forming and then towering on his desk, magically disappearing overnight so that each day there was the challenge to create a higher pile of numbers than the day before. He didn't see it as a pointless task; he saw it as a game he got to play every single day, and no matter what, he always won.

But he would not abandon his children to contend with this madness alone. They were in it together, Benny and the kids. Josh had surrept.i.tiously eaten six pieces of tasteless multigrain bread slathered in soy b.u.t.ter. He would never complain, he would just adapt, until it was too late: the curse of the Middlestein men. Emily, dark-eyed and dangerous and glowering from the other end of the table, insistently made eye contact with her father, at one point openly staring at him while simultaneously stabbing her fork vengefully and noisily into the food on her plate. Rach.e.l.le ignored her, instead focusing on cutting her food into the tiniest of squares, which she would then chew thoughtfully and slowly, as if she were savoring every vitamin, as if she could feel each bite extending her life span. Rach.e.l.le, alone, finished all the food on her plate.

It must be so nice to feel so right all the time, he thought. He would ask her that later. What that felt like.

After dinner, after Benny had done the dishes (defiantly dumping the remaining purplish mess into the garbage, because no he would not be taking the leftovers to work the next day), after the kids watched whatever c.r.a.ppy reality television show they were emotionally invested in that week, after they practiced their haftorah readings for their upcoming b'nai mitzvah, their voices reverberating sweetly from the living room, and after Rach.e.l.le forced Josh to try on his new suit for his father, Josh executing a glamorous turn as if he were on a runway-that kid had moves-before suddenly turning, embarra.s.sed, and then running back upstairs again, and after the kids went to bed early, which is something that had not occurred ever in their house, Benny and Rach.e.l.le stood out in the backyard, near the tarp-covered swimming pool, and shared a joint, Rach.e.l.le taking just one hit before proclaiming, "That is the last time I am ever smoking this stuff ever again." (This was not a lie, she meant it as fact, but it was untrue nevertheless.) "Whatever," said Benny.

"Don't whatever me," said Rach.e.l.le.

Benny took a walk around the pool, stopping on the far side, then taking a step back and peering up at the house he had paid off nearly all on his own, only the down payment coming from Rach.e.l.le's parents, a dowry of sorts, he supposed, or at least some sort of panicked gesture toward the then-young couple who had gotten pregnant before they had even graduated from college. It was a simple mistake in the bathroom of his fraternity house, his intention being merely to hoist her up onto the sink and get her off with his tongue, but it tasted so good, too good, and then he stood and plunged inside of her without protection, their eyes locked together, it was just supposed to be for a minute, just one more minute, and then he would return to his duties downstairs, but neither of them could stop themselves, they were making nonsensical noises, they were having nonsensical thoughts, and he, deft, mathematical, precise Benny, made a serious miscalculation.

"Uh-oh," he had said.

"Uh-oh?" she had said.

And now look at this house, brick, Colonial style with two st.u.r.dy pillars in the front that made Benny feel safe, like his family would be protected, two stories, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a sunny kitchen, a shaded living room, a wet bar in the bas.e.m.e.nt, a backyard with room enough for a swimming pool, a luxurious deck, and a badminton net in the summertime. (There was talk of building a gazebo, but not until after he saw what this year's bonus was like.) A garage, with two sumptuous Lexuses in it. A shed with one of those lawn mowers you can ride. Not that he ever mowed his lawn. There was a guy who did that. He didn't know who the guy was; his wife took care of all of that kind of stuff. Rach.e.l.le took care of him, that's right, he reminded himself. He had trusted her to do so for so long. But he needed to eat. His kids needed to eat.

"We're hungry," he said to Rach.e.l.le.

"There was plenty of food on that table tonight," she said.

"The kids are still growing. They need more than just vegetables," he said. "And I'm suddenly going bald if you hadn't noticed."

"There is no scientific evidence linking hair loss to eating more vegetables," she said.

He threw his hands up in the air, gestured toward the sky, and then toward his head, and then back again.

"It's true," she said. "I looked it up on the Internet."

He took another hit from his joint and then realized he was high, and hungrier than ever, and there was not a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing in the house worth eating. He wondered if she would notice if he went for a walk and hit up the closest fast-food place, a McDonald's about a half mile away. Maybe he would sneak back some fries for the kids. She'd probably smell it on him, though. He'd never make it past the first floor.

And then a scream rang out in the cool spring air, and Benny tossed his joint without thinking (this would eventually be found by the guy who mowed the lawn, in this case an Illinois State student on summer vacation, who would pocket it in one slippery motion and then later smoke it blissfully in his pickup truck during his lunch break) and ran toward the front of the house, two steps behind Rach.e.l.le, the scream sending shivers up his arms and the back of his neck. It was a child's scream, he was certain. Don't stop for nothing, Middlestein. He rounded the corner and saw Emily, lying on the ground, her head cracked open, her arm pointed in a strange direction, as if it were trying to flee her body. Benny glanced up at the house: Her second-floor window was open, and Josh peered out of it, his mouth shaped like an O. Then Rach.e.l.le was by her side, and so was he; both of them were bent over her, both of them terrified as they had never been before, their fear only receding after the st.i.tches, after the twenty-four-hour watch-for-a-concussion period was over, and after the cast was put on. ("It was a clean break," the doctor a.s.sured them, and they repeated this phrase over and over to anyone who would listen, as if focusing on this one positive thing would spin the entire incident into the plus category.) And when their heart rates returned to normal, and Rach.e.l.le stopped with her crying jags, and Emily was no longer in the worst pain of her life, and her grandparents had come and gone (separately, of course) with books and balloons and chocolates, and Benny finally said to his daughter, "What were you doing?" and Emily replied, "I just had to get out of there," Benny did not even turn and look at his wife to see her expression, because he already knew what she was thinking, what she had to be thinking or she was not the woman he had married and she had been fooling him all this time, which was, "Enough is enough already."

Edie, 332 Pounds.

As part of her early-retirement package, the law firm where she had worked for thirty-three years had extended her the opportunity to keep her health care at an extremely low rate until death or something better came along. She also received her pension plan in full, and on top of that, a not-unfair amount of money to keep her mouth shut about the fact that they were letting her go mainly because her weight distressed the three new partner-owners of the firm, who were all children of the people who had originally hired Edie straight out of law school, freshly married, not yet pregnant, a much slimmer version of herself. She had, at various times in her life, been a more righteous person, more p.r.o.ne to moral outrage, a sc.r.a.pper, and that person would have considered this not nearly enough money in exchange for being discriminated against, that there was not enough money in the world to allow someone to say to you-without actually saying it, mind you-You're fat, now will you please go away?

But Edie was exhausted, the whole world tired her, and in a humiliated moment she accepted their offer, even smiled while she shook their hands. Maybe this was a chance to reboot. She wanted more time to spend with her grandchildren. A month later her doctor told Edie her diabetes had worsened, and that he would have to have a stent inserted into her leg, to make that awful, cramping pain she (mostly) refused to admit she was in go away. She might even need a bypa.s.s someday. She could get sicker, he told her. She could die. Then she was suddenly grateful for the health care and the money in the bank, and also the time to recover from all her wounds.

The first surgery was tomorrow morning. Down the hall her son, Benny, slept in his old bedroom; he would be driving her to Evanston at 6:00 A.M., so that her husband could go to the pharmacy he owned later in the morning and sign for some deliveries, which apparently no one else on the entire planet could sign for except him. She wouldn't even think of asking her daughter, Robin, who lived downtown, to spend the night in her home. It was hard enough to get her to come to dinner.

She lay awake now, her brain, like always, running a million miles a minute even if she herself moved so slowly it sometimes was like she was not even in motion at all. She was thinking about food, specifically a value-size package of kettle-baked sea salt potato chips and a plastic tub of deli onion dip she had purchased from the Jewel that afternoon, which were sitting downstairs in her kitchen, waiting for her like two friends who had come over for coffee and a little chitchat.

But it was after midnight, and she had been instructed not to eat anything eight to twelve hours before her surgery, and she was scheduled to have her leg cut into at 8:00 A.M. So here she was, on the tail end of acceptable timing, wondering how much damage she would really do to herself if she had a few potato chips, we're talking just a handful, and some of that cool, salty dip, and that dip was not even like solid food, it was like drinking a gla.s.s of milk, and those potato chips were so airy, one bite and they were over. Poof. What she was thinking about eating wouldn't even fill up one of her pinkies. All she had to do was get up out of bed, and go downstairs, and then she would be reunited with her two new best friends.

Her husband snored next to her seemingly innocently, uselessly. The most he had done for her lately was bring home her prescriptions, but he was a pharmacist! He had been bringing home her prescriptions their entire life together. Sorry, Middlestein. No points. He did not turn in his sleep; he picked a position and stuck with it all night. Not one tussle with the universe for that one, she thought.

What she didn't know was that he had been plotting all day the right way and time to leave her, and that in six more months, a few weeks before she had a second surgery, on a Friday afternoon, he would announce that he did not love her anymore and that he had not for a long time and he believed she felt the same, and for both of their sakes, for both of their lives, he was going to take the step of walking out that door and never coming back. There was also the not-so-subtle subtext of his wanting to have s.e.x again with somebody in this lifetime, though obviously not with Edie herself. He had left so quickly, like the G.o.dd.a.m.n coward he was-he had taken nothing with him except for his clothes, which, while she was at Costco, he had packed in the luggage they got for that terrible trip to Italy-that she hadn't had a chance to argue with him, and what would she have said? He was probably right.

Still, she will be sad when the split finally happens. She will weep to her son and daughter, although at least a small portion of those outbursts will be calculated to make them hate their father. After a while she will stop being sad that he's gone because she'll realize she doesn't miss him, and then she will be sad because she's spent so long with someone she doesn't even miss, and then after that she'll be more sad because she realizes she does miss him, or at least having someone around, even if they didn't speak to each other that much. In the end, it had just been nice to know that someone was in the room, she will tell Benny, even though that is kind of a f.u.c.ked-up thing to say to a son about his father. (But Edie was never one for self-control.) And now the room was empty. Just her. Just Edie. She knew that there were even more things to be sad about, so many layers of sadness yet to be unfolded. She had lived an entire life already, and now here was another one she had to start living fresh from the beginning.

Right now, though, the night before her first surgery, her only consideration was the potato chips and the onion dip, party food, a mere appetizer, but this was no party. Tomorrow a tiny metal tube would be inserted into her leg. It was not a big deal as far as surgeries went, although no one was happy with the idea of her being cut open in the first place. But she would be able to walk the same as always, even the same day. There would be some pain and some painkillers. She was going to be okay, though. She came from st.u.r.dy Russian stock, she kept telling herself, even though her father had died before he turned sixty. If only he hadn't smoked, if only he hadn't drank. If only she didn't eat.

She rose from her bed, and traveled along the same floorboards she had been traveling on for thirty-five years, the only ones that didn't creak beneath her, the only ones that would not wake her husband. She had worn a slight path in the carpeting above the floor, but they had never bothered to replace it. It was a room they spent little time in, lights out, good night, that's it. The carpeting was blue and nubby and stained with who-knows-what. The diamond-checked wallpaper curling at the ends. The curtains hadn't been opened in decades. The room was sealed from the outside world.

With her eyes shut, she could walk the path from her bed, down the hallway past Benny's and Robin's old bedrooms, their high-school graduation photos hanging on the wall outside each, their bathroom that had become hers, a place for her to hide her naked self, down the stairs, all of which creaked, but by then she was home free in her own home-Richard would never hear a thing; then through the living room, where the carpeting was newer though not new, a sky-gray plush frieze purchased when the grandchildren were younger, somewhere soft for them to play, and it had always felt nice under her feet when she made this nightly journey to the kitchen, the last stop before the linoleum, washed-out orange daisies on scuffed yellow-and-brown tile. Thirty-five years ago that tile had cheered her up every morning, and now, like everything else, it was just another surface to cross until she reached the food she desired.

She pushed through the swinging doorway to the kitchen and choked out a cry: There sat Benny, a book in front of him, a cup of coffee, a chocolate chip cookie on a plate, a stale, pained look on his face. He had been waiting awhile for her. He could not rest until she did.

"What's up, Mom?" he said. "You thirsty?"

"I was... yes, thirsty." Dazed, she went to a cabinet and pulled out a gla.s.s, walked to the refrigerator and pressed the gla.s.s up into the built-in ice dispenser, then leaned against the refrigerator. "Should I go back to bed?"

"It's your house, you can do whatever you want," he said. He closed the book in front of him. It was a Harry Potter book. He pointed to it, a little embarra.s.sed. "The kids like them, I wanted to see what it was all about."

"Any good?" she said. She poured some water into the gla.s.s from a Brita on the counter, and then sat down at the table with him.

Benny, not as tall as his father, but better looking, smoother skin, tamer eyebrows, a warmer heart, he had turned out so well, considered the book with a back-and-forth of his head. "Goes quick," he said. "They like things that move fast, those two."

"They're both so bright," said Edie. "And good-looking. And funny."

"All right, all right, Grandma, we know you're crazy about them. Don't go giving them a big head." He had been a jokey, sweet kid, and he had grown into a jokey, sweet man.

She took a big gulp of her water, and restrained herself from pushing her lie too far and letting out a satisfied Ahhh. She tapped her fingers on the table, her paltry wedding ring barely giving off a shimmer. "So why are you up? Are you having trouble sleeping?"

"One hundred percent I don't want to be sitting down here," he said. "But the doctor told me that it was important for a number of reasons you have an empty stomach before the surgery." Your weight, he didn't say. Your heart, he didn't say. Your health, your life, your death. "I just wanted to remind you about that. In case you had forgotten."

"I'm just getting some water," she said.

"And I'm just reading a book," he said.

Six months later, he sat in the kitchen the night before another surgery. And again she rose from her bed in hopes he would not be there, and again he stopped her from eating. It was something good he could do for this person even though it was hard because it made him feel powerful in a way he never wanted. He respected his mother, because she had raised him with love, and because she was a smart woman, even though she was also so incredibly stupid. Also, he respected humanity in general. He respected a person's right to weakness. For all these reasons, he never told anyone he stayed up late waiting for his mother, not even his wife. What happened in that kitchen was between Benny and Edie. With grace he offered her his love and protection, and she accepted it, tepidly, warily. It did not bring them closer together, but it did not tear them apart.

The Walking Wounded.

Emily and her grandmother, Edie, walked around the track of the high school she would attend the next fall so slowly, so grudgingly, that it was possible it did not even count as exercise at all. Could one walk with loathing? They were doing it.

Emily, sharp-eyed, a ripe plum of a girl, with golden brown hair like her mother, was still tender from falling from the second story of her house one week before, her arm in a cast, a few st.i.tches on her temple. Her grandmother, obese, sweating, limping, had had two surgeries in the past year. There could be another one at any minute, that's what Emily's parents were saying. A bigger one, way worse than the other two. A bypa.s.s.

"Look at you two, the walking wounded," her father had joked an hour earlier, leaning delicately on his Lexus, watching them shuffle off in the direction of the high school.

"Pah," her grandmother had said, and slung her hand behind her dismissively, not even bothering to look at him.

"Exactly," Emily had said. "What she said."

"I can't help it if you two are adorable," he yelled. "Grandmother and granddaughter. Two generations!"

"What a sap," said Edie.

They barely made it to the track, and now they were barely making it around the track, the required mile, required by Emily's mother, who had lately been determined to save Edie's life.

"Have you noticed your father is going bald?" said Edie.

"It's weird, right?" said Emily.

It had happened suddenly, her father's hair loss; one day he was good-looking, with a full head of hair, younger than all the other dads at his school, sprightly and in love with her mother, and Emily had felt safe in her own home and in the world around her.

And then all these things happened at once: Her grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes and a whole bunch of other little things that went along with it, then her grandfather left her grandmother so that he could date weird women he met on the Internet (she had heard her father tell her mother), and her mother freaked the eff out. Holy c.r.a.p, she had never seen her so crazy in her entire life, and her mom was already definitely an obsessive type, her hair, the house, the furniture, the carpeting, the lawn, Emily's hair, Josh's hair, their grades, their b'nai mitzvah, everyone else's hair, and on and on, everything had to be perfect. She swore if her mother could adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes, she would, just so it could be just right.

In the middle of all this, Emily found herself surprisingly full of this really intense but deeply satisfying hate. She was a hater all of a sudden. She had negative things to say about her twin brother Josh (dopey, a pushover, sometimes even wimpy), her girlfriends at school (talked about boys so much, too much, weren't there other things to talk about? Like music or television or movies or books or crazy grandparents, anything but boys), and her homework (a waste of time, boring, repet.i.tive, and fifty other words that all equaled one big snooze).

And don't even get her started on her mother, the intensity of Emily's emotions in opposition to her mother's very being were so strong that it had propelled her, late at night, out her window one week before, across the roof, and over to the tall, Colonial-style pillars that guarded the front porch, which she attempted to cling to and slide down, immediately flopping out onto the front driveway, slamming her head on the ground, and breaking her left arm neatly, in fact, so neatly that it inspired her doctor to say, "You got lucky," which made her laugh, and also her parents, too, because of course no one in that room felt lucky.

It was not even that surprising when her father started to go bald, entire chunks of hair disappearing every day, as if an evil hair troll snuck into his bedroom every night while he slept and whisked it off his head and into the night. Here was another thing that was happening to someone she knew and loved. Here was another thing that was wrong with the world. Add it to the list of Things That Suck, an actual, brand-new list that existed in a journal that she kept in her locker at school, seemingly the only place safe in the universe from her mother or the cleaning woman, Galenka, who had been tending to their house for so long that she felt perfectly ent.i.tled to invade every part of Emily's room, which was fine when she'd been five, but not when she was nearly thirteen.

"Mortality"-that was a word she had learned recently, something that had been discussed in Hebrew school. She had heard it before, she knew what it meant, but it had never applied before. Life in the biblical world was so fragile. Everyone was afraid of death at any moment. Everything was so epic, there was so much potential for disaster, storms, floods, pestilence. Diabetes (now also on the Things That Suck list) felt biblical. So did baldness. Never before had Emily realized that the world was so heavy, as heavy as her grandmother's flesh heaving next to her on the high-school track, so heavy that she could feel it balancing on her neck and back. She believed that her brother did not feel the same weight as her. She pitied him for his blindness, and she envied him for his freedom, and if she had known just a few months before, during more innocent times, that she would feel that way for the rest of her life, not just about Josh but about a lot of people in the world, which is to say (in a polite way) conflicted, she would have treasured those unaware, nonjudgmental, preadolescent moments more thoroughly. (Oh, to be eleven again!) Because once you know, once you really know how the world works, you can't unknow it.

And now Emily was starting to know.

"No one in our family is bald," huffed her grandmother. "The whole thing is ridiculous. We come from strong stock."

On the far side of the high school's parking lot, there was a baseball field; a visiting team warmed up, a coach cracking pop-ups to the outfield. Even from a distance, the baseball players looked tall to her. The idea of being older and bigger made her tingle. She could not wait to get to high school. She was absolutely certain that things would be better in high school: the cla.s.ses, the people, the quality of life.

"I don't think people even understand how strong our gene pool is," said her grandmother. "You've got a lot of Russian blood in you. Russians are built to withstand winter."

Emily could admit that her life wasn't so bad now, and that getting older and bigger meant that there were more risks involved. She just wanted more out of it. Couldn't she do better? Couldn't everyone just do a little bit better?

"Your great-grandfather fled Ukraine to come here. He walked through snow and ice and over mountains just to catch a train to Germany, and then he had to sit on that train for weeks. And he had nothing. Crusts of old bread and cheese. He had one potato he would peel every other day, and he would let the skin sit in his mouth for hours just so he could suck in every last vitamin. Could you imagine that?"

Emily was almost certain her grandmother was lying to her, but she loved the way she was telling the story, the way her voice giddily rose and fell, almost drunkenly, and yet her voice was crisp, and she articulated her words beautifully.

"Would you like that, kiddo? An uncooked potato skin for dinner?" Her grandmother poked her in her delicate belly, and Emily pulled away and laughed.

"No potato skins for me, thanks," said Emily.