Days of Awe by Lauren Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

sexy, older Cal flirts with my mother. He even goes so far as to brush a crumb off of her sleeve. My mother, and this stud! Well, now I know why she wanted to come here.
    I grab three chocolate-chip cookies, a cupcake, and an éclair and pile them on my plate. Carrot cake, my ass. “Mom,” I say, trying to pull her attention toward me like the needy nine-year-old I suddenly am. “Mom.
Mom.
Mom.
Doesn’t this look like the dessert table at my wedding?”
    But it’s Cal who turns to me and chuckles. “Catherine and I got married at the courthouse,” he says. “There was a row of inmates in orange prison jumpsuits sitting on a bench in front of the judge’s chambers. We used to say that they were her bridesmaids.” He smiles at me, and the weird, small, hibernating rodent of my soul opens one eye and looks around before falling back asleep.
    I shove a huge bite of éclair in my mouth and feel the overwhelming need to make a run for it. I’m about to guide my mother to the door when Jillian claps her hands three times, loudly. “Can everybody come on back to the circle for a minute? Just for one more short minute?”
    Cal looks at me. “She loves that circle,” he whispers. His smile is quick and generous, like he likes to appreciate things.
    “Loves it,” I say, smiling back and hoping there’s no chocolate on my face.
    The air in the room has shifted again, or maybe it’s my own lungs. As we head back to our chairs, Helene leans into me and whispers, “Is he the kind of person who would hide us in an attic?” which is her litmus test for every non-Jewish boyfriend I’ve ever had, which is all of them.
    My mother and I sit back down, and I hand her a chocolate-chip cookie, which, with her good hand, she accepts.
    ···
    Helene was four when she left Germany. In a shoebox in her closet, there’s a soft, faded black-and-white photograph of her on the boat, sandwiched between her parents, holding their hands, crying. The railing is behind them and the ocean beyond, gray and menacing in the photograph. I can only imagine how tightly my grandparents must have been gripping Helene’s little fingers.
    “Oh, Mom,” I said when she first showed it to me. In the photo her dark blond hair is in pigtails, her eyes squinting into the sun, her mouth open in despair. “You look so sad. Like you knew what was going on. Like you knew what you had left behind.” For a moment I thought I felt that sadness. It moved through me, expanded and lifted me. It was the most I had ever felt.
    She took the picture from my hands and shook her head. “Nah. I remember that day. There was a man on the deck who had become friendly with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa had a”—she waved her hand, trying to pluck the word out of the air—“a whatchamacallit, a Leica. And this man offered to take our picture. I didn’t want him to take my damn picture. I wasn’t sad, I was mad.”
    I was thirteen when we had this conversation. My mind had recently been blown by the revelations of history. I had decided that my mother’s flight from Germany made me extremely special and precious. I would lie awake at night sometimes and think,
It’s amazing I’m even here!
A miracle!
Like I was some kind of unusual, exotic bird.
Me!
I would think, and it was the beautiful bird’s rare chirp.
Me, me, me!
    It didn’t help that my grandparents fussed and hovered over me, their only grandchild, flapping about, even more so after my parents’ divorce, tending to me after school well beyond the age I needed tending, feeding me and telling me to be careful and calling me
schätze,
their treasure.
    For a long time, I believed I was destined for something spectacular. I didn’t know what, but I thought it would probably involve heroically preventing a genocide or possibly producing some kind of work of art, something of such astounding beauty that, upon viewing, no human being would ever again be capable of cruelty. My ambitions were lofty but extremely