#she's got doilies on the table and the couch is covered in plastic

[mereberry]

I miss living with my grandparents:

The Raisin Bran, the smiling sun whose scoops I mistook for shoes, the impression of Tony the Tiger my Papa did in his cheerful, shaking voice, the heavy smear Country Crock Butter across cinnamon-sugared toast and cups upon cups of white grape juice. I miss everything. At breakfast they’d give me sips of their tea, a spoon of my own to steal their grapefruit, they’d watch the morning news that I’d undoubtedly hear again in the evening,

I miss Gardening gloves, gardening clogs soon softened by morning sunshine, lawn chairs, crape Myrtles and magnolia and gardenia, reading the funnies tummy-down on the patio while Grandma looked for coupons for a gift for Papa and watered her Harrison roses before the sun got too hot and high in the sky

While I prayed we’d have visitors at the hummingbird feeder, bright with red the same color as Grandma’s ruby ring, prayed for birds at the bird feeder, prayed for birds to splash in her birdbath, prayed for birds at her birdhouses, prayed for birds so she would hush me and whisper their Latin names that I never remembered

The only Latin i heard was in church and from her mouth and to me that meant something

She’d check the rain gauge while papa marched to the 80s exercise VHS tapes and old TV, convex bubble of a screen in front of a couch too close for watching, subtitled, and

Walking and

walking to the rhythm of a woman faded into green and red static and music,

In the garden my grandma sang ballads of women scorned in a soft voice; I wondered as a child if my grandma could’ve been a singer herself and now wonder if it was nostalgia for her too as she sung, warbling and smiling around her chipped tooth,

She spoke like music, highs and lows and accented in ways that I now have and can’t bring myself to be ashamed of, her mouth lined in a mauve lipstick I look for on drugstore shelves

Afterwards I watched her fold her robes, freshly washed after the Sunday service that she’d sung at the day before, her voice there indistinguishable in the choir, hidden with a modesty that frustrated me

I miss Prairie Home companion on the drives over to the mall in her pickup to find those gifts for Papa, syllabant s’s and jokes I didn’t get, absently being scolded for itching bugbites, for picking the craters and sidewalk-chalk dust their pebbled driveway left in my knees- a plastic cup of sweet iced tea and a molasses cookie my reward for being so patient

As though I’d rather be anywhere else

As though I couldn’t spend hours in the piles of National Geographic, dog eared around the Hubble Telescope, the bats, the migration of the monarchs, hours in my uncle’s comics with the advertisements for ten-cent gum and muscle pills, hours in the postcards kept in a hatbox, hours in their yearbooks filled with white women named carol and men who looked much older than their age, hours in their books of poetry my mother read at my age

Papa would pass me sheets of printer paper, handfuls of jellybeans, lend me rock-hard erasers and fountain pens as easily as crayons and tack every drawing to the fridge

The only things on their fridge was my birth announced in a paper and the drawings, and that meant something to me

Hours passed quietly, the booms of the giant grandfather clock always silenced by Papa’s handiwork when I stayed over despite getting over my fear of it years ago, same as the thunder that rolled over their little house, now a comfort

Raining, pouring, the old man snoring

And soon he was, fast asleep as grandma scooped my spaghettios into a saucepan, made me promise to keep their kitchen clean, condensation on faded glass sat atop doilies sat atop glass-covered tables, and I stayed clean with everything in me, helped put plates in the sink I couldn’t see over, cleaned with needlepoint towels and soap the scented brightly with jasmine

The evening newscaster, handsome and solemn, recounted the day, and I’d eventually migrate to the plush carpet so faded from sun darkened to the golden beige in the afternoon, the recliner with the same leathery skin as them where I’d watch basketball games late into the night, coved in the old tied-felt blankets I gave as Christmas gifts, sleepily hearing them open the lids of multivitamins

The slow clacking on the keyboard, printing maps for the next day,

, Their opening of candy, kept cold in the fridge, snuck to me with silent, crinkle-eye grins despite my fullness from ice cream: Peppermint Patties and twizzlers tough as jerky, chocolate chip cookies I warmed between my hands.

Clasped like prayer, selfishly hoping to never return back to my hurricane-wrecked family

[tarokro]

haruka barely socialised with other children for at least 2 years

[tropes-and-tales]

Elegies and Aubades, Part Four

Characters:  Richard Alonso Muñoz and F!Reader

WC:  3036

Other Pieces:  This is part four.  You can find the series here.

CW:   Mutual pining.  Fluff.

________________

It takes a few weeks to set a date for your movie night.  Each day is a unique blend of nerve-shredding anxiety and the faint nausea of butterflies in Richard’s stomach.  Your letters back and forth have tapered off, as he feared, but it’s not terrible:  now you’re texting more, and that has its own thrill.  Instead of picturing you at your kitchen table, thoughtfully writing out your latest letter... instead Richard pictures you…wherever.  When his cell pings with an incoming message, he imagines you on the other side of town (maybe in your office on campus, maybe walking to a classroom).  

It’s instantaneous, and it makes a sharp pain of longing bolt through him every time.  You think of him.  You text him.  Moments later, he receives your text and is thinking about you.  Richard never put much stock in technology before, but there is something a little intimate about texting with you.

Then a date is set for you to come over for dinner and a movie, and Richard is plunged back into hell.

His dating history is paltry, at best.  A handful of dates in high school that barely counted, since they were group dates where the girl he was paired off with mostly ignored him.  There was a woman, the daughter of one of his mother’s church friends, but that ended disastrously after only a month.

Besides, he can’t know what you are thinking.  Do you view this as a romantic evening?  Or are you just friends?  Some of the younger guards at work complain about woman putting them in the friend-zone, and Richard almost asks them what that means, exactly.  But the truth is that he’d be happy just to be your friend, just to have you to talk to and see movies with and playfully argue about the books you each read.

It’s the small, quiet voice in him that wants more – the one that whispers in the dark of his room each night that maybe you could be more than a friend.  It always seems possible then, at night.  It’s in the morning in the cold light of day that he concedes the unlikelihood of it all – you’re educated and whip-smart, funny and gorgeous.  You are completely out of his league.

It doesn’t stop him from agonizing over the date.  He studies his home with a critical eye and despairs.  It was his childhood home, then his mother’s home (for a few years, when he rented an apartment nearby in a bid to launch his own adult life).  Then it was his home again, when his mother got sick and he moved back in to nurse her through it.  An only child, he inherited it when she died.

It still feels like his mother’s home.  Richard didn’t have the heart to declutter once she passed, so he just kept everything as it was.  Why bother?  No one ever came over.

Now, suddenly, you are three days away from visiting him, and everything looks wrong.  Everything looks like an old lady lived here, which….she did.  There’s lace doilies everywhere, little china figurines, a million throw pillows.  The couch is covered in slippery, protective plastic.  There’s framed pictures of Richard everywhere, which was fine when it was his mother’s house, but now it seems weirdly narcissistic with just him living there.

He takes a half-day off on Friday just to clean.  Instead, he mostly becomes paralyzed by panic and gets very little done.  And then it’s Saturday, and you are knocking on his door.

*****

When it comes to Richard Muñoz (formerly Officer Muñoz), you’ve found that it’s easier not to overthink it.  

On paper, it looks insane:  a guard at your brother’s prison, who read all of your letters and who patted you down every month for contraband – well, you’re friends with him now.  He came to your house, you screamed at him like a harpy, then you apologized, and then he replied, and then you struck up a correspondence of letter-writing until you were watching for the mail like some lonely waif on the English moors.

Ridiculous, right?

So you don’t think about it too much, which is hard – you’re a classic overthinker.  Richard seems to be an overthinker too, and maybe that’s why you get along so well with him.  You have similar interests, you seem similarly introverted.  You both seem lonely, and you both seem to relish your time together.

Overthinker Richard is on full display tonight.  He answered his door with his face already scarlet from something, his blushing so strong that his tanned face looks almost purple.  It doesn’t ever really die down, in the course of the evening.

He apologizes for everything.  The state of his home (which is lovely – a little cluttered and dated, but who are you to complain, when your home isn’t even unpacked from the move yet?).  The state of the meal, which is just take-out from the corner Chinese place.  His dog, a little dervish of white fur that is so excited to see you that she pees a little (which makes Richard blush even harder, until you think he may have a stroke).

He even hands you the boxed set of movies with an apology, and he asks you to pick your poison.

You flip through the options, then remark that there really are fifty DVDs in the set.  “We could have a movie night every weekend for almost a year,” you say, and that makes Richard sputter and turn redder and stammer out some half-formed sentences about finding that idea lovely.

Over your meal of fried rice and spring rolls, and over the course of the movie (Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest), your mind is half in the moment, half ruminating over Richard.  He sits on the other end of the couch, stiff and still as a pylon, and the tension radiates off of him like an electrical current.  Every time you shift in your seat, he flinches a little.

You aren’t sure how to figure him out.  There’s the obvious – he’s a shy man, clearly.  There’s a divide in him too, an assured and confident Richard in the letters he writes, and the flinching, apologetic Richard in person.  

You wonder if he has feelings for you.  Maybe…it’s hard to know.  You’d try to ask him directly, but you can’t do it now.  He’s so red and tense that his blood pressure must be astronomical, and you’d hate for him to have a cardiac event during the hijinks of an Oscar Wilde adaptation.

You decide to not push it.  You enjoy his company and his letters, and that can be enough for you.  

When the movie is over, you help him clean up the dishes from dinner (he sputters at that too, scandalized at your offer of help as a guest, but you shoo away his concerns and help anyway).

When you go to leave, Richard doesn’t make a single move – he only stands by the door, his arms stock-straight at his sides.  So you hug him, as you did before.  It’s nothing salacious, just a slightly self-conscious side hug where you wrap only one arm around him for the briefest of seconds.  You try to ignore the cozy scent of him, some alchemy where his laundry detergent and soap combine into a warm, clean smell that makes you want to curl up against him.

You release him and step outside, but you turn to look at him one last time before you go.  His face is perpetually blushing, but he’s smiling too.

“Send me a text so that I know you made it home safely,” he says, and you do him one better – when you’re safely ensconced in your house, you call him.  You tell him that you had a lovely evening, and you half-jokingly, half-seriously ask when you can come over again for another movie.

His answer surprises you in how earnest he sounds.  “Anytime,” he says.  “Anytime you want.”

*****

The two of you fall into a routine, and Richard is so happy that he doesn’t even mourn the loss of your letters.  Twice a month, sometimes three times a month, you come over to his place and watch a movie with him.

It’s enough for some of the anxiety to bleed away.  He realizes that you don’t judge him about his home (though he took the plastic covering off of the couch before your first visit).  You don’t judge him when his dog is naughty (like when she chewed up one of your shoes).  

Each movie is exquisite agony, especially when you start shifting closer to him on the couch.  It’s not enough to touch him, but he can still feel the heat and solidness of your body beside his own.  He gets lost in his tortured mind, wondering if you are giving him a sign, wondering if you feel something for him.  Sometimes he can feel your eyes shift from the TV screen to his face, and he wonders what you’re thinking at you stare at him.

There’s a guard at work, Martin, that Richard sometimes has lunch with.  He’s the closest thing to a confidant that he has, so he takes a deep breath one day and asks him.

“How can you tell if a woman likes you?”  He cringes at the question once it’s out of his mouth; he sounds like a plaintive child instead of a grown man.

Martin finishes chewing his sandwich and fixes Richard with a curious gaze.  “You got a girl, Rich?”

He shakes his head.  He can feel his cheeks growing warm.

Martin stares at him a beat longer, then offers his sage advice.  “Try to kiss her,” he says.  “If she slaps you, she ain’t into you.”

-----

Richard would never even entertain the idea of kissing you against your will, so he puts his question aside and just coasts along with the moments he has with you.  He tries to be grateful for what he has and ignores the gnawing need for more.

It’s the beginning of December when you cancel one of your standing dates.  You text him first, the day before, but then you call him moments later.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him.  “But I’ve been living in this house for almost two years now, and I have to get serious about unpacking.  I made a goal to get it done before the new year starts…”  You trail off, and he can picture you doing that shrug of yours, as if to say what can you do?

Of course he’s disappointed.  It was a long work week, and his movie evenings with you are like a refreshing oasis in the middle of the desert.  The thought of not seeing you for another week makes his heart sink, but he replies as cheerfully as he can.  

“Don’t apologize,” he says.

“I mean, I’d love to see you,” you say.  “You’re always welcome to come over here, but I’d have to put you to work.”  You laughed at that, but when Richard jumps on your offer (I’d be happy to come over and help you unpack), you go silent for a beat.

“Seriously?” you ask.  “I was only joking, but if you do want to come over, I’d love the help.”

Your words are thundering in his ears – I’d love to see you – and they warm him so much he’d agree to nearly anything.  Instead, he tells you that he’ll be there in the morning, ready for any heavy lifting or cleaning that you need.  Anything at all.

*****

You have come to a conclusion about Richard.  You treated him a little academically, like he was a hypothesis for you to test out and prove.  The hypothesis?  That he has a crush on you.  Results?  Almost certainly yes.  The rigid way he sits near you, the way he apologizes for anything he thinks may offend you…paired with how happy he sounds when you call him, how wide he smiles when he opens his door to you.

Something holds him back from pursuing it, and that’s what you want to figure out next.  Maybe it’s guilt from how the two of you met.  Maybe he’s been hurt in the past and would rather just stay safely friends.

The mean little voice in the back of your head – your mother’s voice, if you’re being honest with yourself – tells you that he knows you’re trash, and that he doesn’t pursue you because of it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a man rejected you because of your humble, oft-times criminal origins.

Now, though, Richard is in your home again, helping you finally move in.  He turned up that morning a little overdressed, but by the afternoon, he has unbuttoned his flannel shirt enough for you to see the crisp white collar of his undershirt and the small gold cross he wears.

You can also see just a hint of dark chest hair, and the sight is enough to make your mouth go dry with desire.  Pull yourself together, you admonish yourself silently.  The man flinches when you move too close to him.  You can’t tackle him because of a bit of chest hair.

With his help, you make astounding progress.  He assembles your bed frame so that you’re no longer sleeping on the mattress on the floor.  He helps you move furniture to where it belongs, patiently moving it again and again until it looks just right to your critical eye.  He carries boxes and cleans and unpacks and he does it all with that shy, slightly pleased smile that makes your heart twist a little.

When you thank him, you notice that his smile stays on his face longer.  You wonder how much praise Richard gets in his life.  Next to none, you imagine.  A super max prison hardly seems like the place where one would get life affirming compliments, and he doesn’t seem to have many friends other than you.

You both take a break for a late lunch of pizza, and you give the dining room (now a proper dining room instead of a repository of boxes and odd furniture pieces) an appraising look.

“You’re a real life-saver, you know,” you tell him, and you smile to see how he flushes at the praise and ducks his head.  

“It’s nothing, really.”

You shake your head at him, bemused.  “Don’t do that thing, Richard.”

“What thing?”

“That thing you always do.  You’re always apologizing or downplaying the nice things you do.”  You set down your half-eaten slice of pizza.  “Let’s practice,” you say.  “I’m going to say something nice to you, and you’re not going to apologize or wave it away.”

His face is a little red, but he’s smiling.  “Okay.”

“Richard, thank you so much for helping me today.  You’re a real life-saver.”  When he only stares at you blankly, you sigh and prompt him.  “Say ‘you’re welcome,’ Richard.”

His moustache twitches and he parrots back, “you’re welcome, Richard.”

You ball up your napkin and throw it at him.  “Smart ass,” you grumble good-naturedly, but he’s grinning at his dumb little joke so you can’t be mad.  “It’s a start.”

-----

Because the two of you are absolutely killing your to-do list, you work through the early evening too.  And you’re glad that you do:  that question about Richard – what’s holding him back from making a move on you – is answered.

You put him to work in your kitchen.  You had only unpacked the necessary items – a few cups and plates, your tea kettle – but most of your kitchenware is still in boxes.  You show him how to work the dishwasher, tell him to run everything through a rinse cycle, and to yell if he needs anything.  Then you go upstairs to work in your study, since there’s a million books that need shelved.

You’re deep in the middle of your poetry collection, trying to figure out if you want to sort by title or author or by type, when you hear Richard yelling for you.  He sounds almost pained, so you sprint down the steps, a book of post-war British poetry still in hand, to find him staring in horror at the box he clearly just opened.

“This is in the wrong room,” he tells you, and his face is that familiar purple-red under his tan.  It’s the color of extreme anxiety, and you almost wonder if you somehow got a box of cobras mixed in with your kitchen stuff.

The lid of the box says “SMALL KITCHEN APPLIANCES,” but when you walk over to stand beside him and peer in carefully, it’s not small appliances at all.

It’s a box of your lingerie.

It makes you laugh, mostly in relief.  You had been missing that box, had searched through all of your luggage and clothing boxes when you first moved, and you had been utterly perplexed at where all your boring neutral bras and panties went.  You had assumed one of the creepy, leering moving men had stolen them.  The truth was much more mundane.

Then you laugh again, at the expression on Richard’s face.  He looks scandalized but also curious – his gaze keeps slipping to study the contents of the box, and you wonder why – it’s nothing extreme or overtly sexy, just black and white cotton, comfortable stuff designed for long work days and not an intimate encounter…

And then it hits you all at once, a world of realization.  You can’t prove it in the moment, but you are an academic, and oftentimes the simplest explanation is the correct one.  Occam’s Razor.  Your mind runs through every other plausible scenario, but it keeps settling on the same answer to the same questions.  

Why does Richard seem happy to see you, but cringes from your touch?

Why does Richard downplay every bit of praise you give him, but smiles and blushes at it anyway?

Why is Richard currently fighting a battle with himself to stare at your mislaid box of everyday bras while also trying not to stare?

You cannot prove it, but if you had to guess (and you’d be willing to bet a sizable sum on your guess)…you’d say that Richard is a virgin.

~~~Tag List~~~ @cannedsoupsucks​   @isvvc-pvscvl​   @bananas-pajamas  @rachelxwayne​   @stardust-fray   @massivecolorspygiant​   @imspillingcoffee​   @amneris21​  @paintballkid711​   @mad-girl-without-a-box​

[thoughtaftermind-blog]

Bubby’s Apartment

Watching age take over 

Bubby’s one-room apartment is where our family grew. The leather couch, sticky during the summer months, is where we reread the only two chapter books she owned. We’d walk through the small hallway, through the doorway with the needlepoint Mizrach sign, and look straight across the room to where we would find her. Bubby’s leather reclining throne sat in the corner. With one leg over the other, leaning toward the stand on the right, where her white corded-phone sat on the lace doily, she’d watch everything her eineklach did in the living room.

“Nisht mit di tzeiner,” she’d call across to whichever of us thought her observant smile wouldn’t catch us biting a lollipop.

When any of us were off from school, we’d spend it on the floor in front of Bubby’s fat-back video machine, learning about the president’s homes, devastating tornadoes, and whatever else was recorded on the stacks of National Geographic CDs that Bubby kept around for our sick days. In the place where she once looked after us, we have to look after her. Today, music plays from the large screen Yanky hooked up for her; in the early days of recent years, she would answer “amen” to the brachos of each wedding video she watched.

That’s the home I try to remember when I visit her apartment. I walk through the hallway and expect to find Bubby in her leather chair. I’m confused, like I have been every time for the past ten years, when there’s a medical grade chair with a hoyah lift instead.

Bubby doesn’t greet me and shuffle over to the kitchen in her robe to toast some rye bread for our lunch. She looks, eyes bright and empty, at the things that only she sees. When I bend near her chair to catch her gaze and say hello, she reaches her arm out. She’s not stiff and resisting like the tens of other times I’ve been by recently. Her fingers fold into mind naturally, softly.

My hand is turning white and red where her nails are digging in as she holds on, too tight. The pain of someone you love, the twinkle still in her eye, speaking to you with words no one understands anymore... What does this conversation mean to her? I piece together the syllables to form the sentences I want to hear.

Yes, the photos from Levi's wedding are beautiful. Your parents are so happy. Maidele, im yirtze Hashem by you.

My uncle Velly is on the couch, taking photos of her uncommon smile to post on WhatsApp. He suggests pulling her chair closer to the couch so that I can sit, but if I alter our stance, the gentle dance may break. What if she’s not ready to take my hand back? Instead of crying I crouch near her, legs going numb, hoping for him to leave to Maariv so that it's just me and Bubby. When no one is watching us, maybe I'll understand more.

Today, her good day, is harder than the ones when she pushes us away. She runs her fingers over mine, again and again. Years ago, these same hands reached into the coat closet to take some blue La-Hits from the top shelf, the secret hiding spot that she thought none of us knew about. The bright wrappers were iconic. If I peeked into her apartment on my way to school, she would give me a handful for my cousins. When I would find them in the hallway at recess and reach out with the blue chocolates, they knew who had thought of them that morning.

I looked for some La-hits in the grocery store one summer. I couldn’t find them at first because they were orange and gold; the blue wrappers gone. When I went to say collect kisses before leaving to camp that afternoon, Bubby called me someone else’s name for the first time.

The apartment didn’t change overnight. First there was the cardboard with the families’ numbers written with marker. Bubby couldn’t remember them on her own. Then Rochel took it down and pinned up a list of numbers directed at her caregiver instead.

It was Tatty’s ideas to hang a flip-book with the days of the week (in Yiddish for Bubby, in English for her caregiver) to remind her what day it was. Someone must have realized that they days don’t matter to her anymore on a Sunday, because the white booklet is paused on that page, turning gray and crusty on the shelf because no one flips it anymore.

Moving the table to the side of the room, the oval one were we sat at for french fries and plastic cups of stale Sprite every Motzei Shabbos, was a practical solution. Its gathering place in middle of the living room didn’t leave space for Bubby’s wheelchair to push past. “My cadillac,” is what she called the walker. When she got a motorized one with brakes, a “rolls-royce” joined the fleet of primary-colored wheelchairs and walkers parked against the shafehs.

If I close my eyes halfway and blur my vision, I can overlay the old apartment atop the new one, like those black and white images of famous landmarks hanging over their modern-day counterpart. The structure’s the same, the life’s changed.

I can tell myself that this isn’t who she always was. I can fade the world she lives in now behind the vibrant bubby we grew up with. For me, there were fifteen years before Alzheimer's took over. Gittel, my little sister, only had two. Her only image is that of the feeble woman, barely speaking, barely smiling, barely Bubby. I reconcile the grandmother we have with the one I grew up with. How can Gittel do the same when she’s got nothing to reconcile against?

Tatty doesn’t like when Gittel visits Bubby because he’d rather her hold on to what she had. The ache marbles with pity as I watch him watch her grow older.

Years ago Bubby came for Shabbos lunch, fifteen years after Zaidy Avraham passed away. She walked in the door, took off her fur-lined Shabbos jacket, and waved to my father across the room. “Hi, Avraham,” she called. The whirl of a busy house was suspended for a moment—thought held mid-air—and we looked from Bubby to Tatty and back again.

Bubby’s head arched downward and she spoke in a soft voice. “I meant Zalman.” She was ashamed of her mistake, of her waning memories. At least now she isn’t frightened, on the tightrope between two understandings anymore.

The silver leichter on the mantle above the video machine—she hasn’t lit it in years. The candelabra with one light for each child, similar to the ones she gifted each of her daughters-in-law, is missing the sheen of flames reflecting off the surface. One of the grandchildren stops by to light at least two of them each week, but it hasn’t been Bubby’s hand kindling, her brachos welcoming Shabbos.

The side table near the recliner in the corner is where Bubby’s Tehillim always sat. Most times that I walked in, she kissed it closed before looking up to greet me. Tatty said she finished the Tehillim each day. As a child who read five words a minute, I thought she was doing the impossible. As an adult who struggles through the monotony reading the sefer, I admire her.

Still crouched near her chair, I turn my head around the small room to find where the Tehillim is. It’s face-up atop Zaidy’s Shas on the middle shelf, far out of Bubby’s reach.

We believe in the value of a life and in the mitzvos gashmi that a person can accomplish each day. When Zaidy was in a coma before he passed, the uncles took turns driving to Manhattan before shkiya each day so that the could lay tefillin on his idle hands and head. That story validated the worth of the last years of his life because I knew that however painful for him and his family, Zaidy was accomplishing something each day. I look at Bubby, with her withered hands and still eyes—at the dulled leichter, the silent Tehillim—and wonder what mitzvah she still gets to do.

Hours later I wait on the couch while the caregiver takes Bubby for her bath. The photos on the walls around me are her story. The framed wedding shots, Rosh Hashanah cards tacked to the walls, graduation photos tucked into the corner of other frames—they are how we watched the family evolve. Even when Bubby is not in the photo, she’s the in the center of it. This apartment is where we grew and these people are who we grew into.

Nothing about this apartment is the same anymore, though. And remembering only reminds me. I want to move it back, to schlep the table back to the middle of the room, move the hoyah lift to the trash pile outside the building, place this worn Tehillim back on the side table, have my Bubby back in the world she loved us in. But the only thing I could do is sit at her dining room table and whisper the words of Tehillim from the Tehillim she used so well. I run my fingers through a few of the pages—ones Bubby must have covered hundreds of times—and then walk through the hallway and out the door. I don’t look around before I close the door behind me.

When it’s  time for Bubby to go to bed and for me to go home, I walk out past the shelf with her Tehillim. I lift it with a full hand and turn back to the dining room table—the same one I played chess at with the cousins and studied for tests with friends.