How I Saved Hanukkah by Amy Goldman Koss Read Free Book Online

friends!”
    “Why are you laughing?” I said.
    Lucy laughed some more, then said, “Want to hear mine?”
    “Hear your what?” I asked.
    “When Ned was a baby and I wanted a baby in my house so badly—and you guys had all those sweet little things . . . tiny booties and soft little crib toys and all, remember?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “I took a rattle with a yellow lamb on it.”
    “You’re kidding!” I said, feeling happier than I’d been in a year. “Do you still have it?”
    “I was so afraid you’d see it in my drawer that after a while, I threw it away too!” Lucy shrieked.
    And we both flew into hysterics.
    Before we lit the candles for the seventh night, Mom said, “I thought making Hanukkah was an old-lady thing. Bubbi made Hanukkah, Auntie Eva made Hanukkah. But I just did the math, and those old ladies were slinging latkes when they were younger than I am now. So either I’m an old lady or they weren’t.”
    *    *    *
    Later that night my dad called to say he really, really, really was on his way home, but there were some problems with connecting flights or something. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I only knew he wasn’t home.
    “Ned isn’t going to like it one bit if my dad misses the party,” I told Lucy.
    It was Lucy’s and my last night together. We looked through that library book on the Jewish holidays and read the Hanukkah part.
    “Yeech!” I said. “I’m glad we didn’t live back then. I wouldn’t have the courage to hide in caves and fight the army and stuff.”
    “I bet you would,” Lucy said. “The story would be ‘Marla Feinstein and the Maccabees.’”
    “Would you come with me?” I asked. “Into the caves?”
    “You bet!” Lucy said.

CHAPTER
9
    W hen I woke up the next morning my dad was home, asleep in bed. I couldn’t keep Ned from pounding him awake. Actually I didn’t really try. My dad was zonked, he said, “from swimming upstream like a salmon” to get home to us. He swooped me up in his arms as if I were as small as Ned, and he gave me one big, scratchy kiss for each day he had been gone. He needed a shave.
    Dad opened his eyes wide. “Red-eye, see?” he said to Ned. “Like Cookie the rat.” Then he went back to bed. It was okay that he was asleep—he was home.
    We all tiptoed out of the house, me, Lucy, my mom, and Ned, and went to the market to buy the stuff for our party. I knew that probably no one in the store thought Lucy and I were twin sisters, but I also knew it was my last chance to feel like we were.
    Lucy’s family came to pick her up just beforelunch. She squeezed into the car with them as I watched from the porch. It wasn’t like she was
leaving
leaving. They were just going four-and-a-half blocks away, so why was I sad?
    Lucy poked her head out the car window and yelled: “We’ll all be back later for the party!” So I guessed she’d invited them first thing, after hello. Lots of hands came shooting out of the windows to wave, and they sped off.
    *    *    *
    My mom spent hours cleaning the toilets and hissing at us whenever we touched
anything
. She couldn’t really yell or she’d wake my dad.
    “Daddy’s home,” Ned would announce every few minutes to me or my mom, as if we didn’t know. I heard him tell his stuffed animals too.
    In the car on our way back to the market my mom said, “You know, the light of the oil lamp was never supposed to go out once it was lit. But folks were so busy redecorating the Temple and washing the toilets, it took eight days to remember to buy more oil.”
    I made a face at her.
    “No, you’re right, maybe the grocery store was an eight-day, round-trip, donkey ride from the Temple.”
    “MOM!”
    “Well, Miss Marla, why do you think it had to last eight days? To give them time to dig an oil well?”
    “Maybe it took that long to squeeze enough oil out of the olives, or something,” I said.
    “We will look it up,” my mom said, “next