Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page B

hostile witness. Sylvie’s father used to be the one to calm her with a quiet word or a Yiddish endearment, but Dave had died of a stroke five years ago, leaving Selma alone and unmodulated. “Are you all right?”
    Sylvie considered. She’d just learned that her husband was carrying on with a legislative aide, a woman who was probably half her age, a woman who, she thought with rising horror, could possibly be pregnant, was at least of an age where she could get pregnant, like John Edwards’s mistress had, so she was a very long way from “all right.”
    “Poor Sylvie,” said her mother. “You should call Jan for the keys.”
    “Keys?” said Sylvie.
    “To the Connecticut house,” Selma said, as if this was obvious. “I’ll come up and visit once you get settled. Remember what I said about teal.” Her mother paused, the way she had before closing arguments. “I love you, sweetie. Always. I’m here if you need me.”
    Sylvie ended the call, tucked her telephone into her purse, and stepped out of the stall. Clarissa stood back respectfully while Sylvie washed her hands and dried them in one of those high-tech blowers. Then, head bent as if buffeted by a heavy wind, she followed her assistant back out to the Town Car, where Derek hurried out to hold the door.
    In the backseat, she slipped off her shoes and then, with some wriggling, her panty hose, which had dug bright-red ridges into her hips. She yanked them over her thighs, her knees and ankles and kicked them onto the car floor, considering her husband, whom she’d loved for so long and thought she’d known so well. She remembered the first time Richard had brought her home to Harrisburg, to the tidy two-bedroom ranch-style house where he’d grown up and where his parents still lived. Richard’s father was bluff and hearty, proudly bald, with a barrel chest and a booming voice and an undying love for the Philadelphia Eagles. “How do you like my boy?” he asked, pounding Richard on his back (this back-thumping, Sylvie would come to learn, was what the male members of Richard’s family did in lieu of expressing emotion or conversing with each other). Cindy, Richard’s mother, was a small, timid woman who didn’t walk so much as scurry, and who barely said a word after her whispered “hello.” (Maybe, Sylvie thought, Richard Senior pounded her back, too, which was what had given her such a cringing, flinching manner.) She’d made a casserole for dinner, something with cream of mushroom soup and ground beef—Richard’s favorite, she’d murmured, scooping it onto thin china plates. She’d put Sylvie’s serving in front of her, then suddenly frozen, looking as stricken as if she’d served her son’s girlfriend a stewed human hand. “Oh, no … is that okay for you? Can you eat it?” she asked, her voice so soft Sylvie could barely hear it. “I can make something else … it’s no problem at all …” Sylvie, puzzled, had assured her that the casserole was fine, and told her, once she’d tasted it, that it was delicious, rich and filling, the perfect meal for a cold winter night.
    Later, tucked up against Richard in his old twin bed, with her toes touching his calves, she’d asked why Cindy had been worried. Richard said he guessed that it was because there was cheese in the dish, along with the beef, and that, even in a land bereft of Jews, his mother had enough of a rudimentary grasp of the principles of keeping kosher that she was worried Sylvie wouldn’t be able to eat meat with dairy.
    “We should write a book,” Sylvie said, fitting her body against his with her cheek against his chest and her hands cradling the back of his neck. “ My First Jew .” He’d rubbed his fingertips gently against the top of her head.
    “I’m checking for horns,” he told her. She’d slipped one of her hands down the front of his pajama bottoms, whispering, “Me, too.” They’d made love for a long, slow time, neither of them making a sound