Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer Read Free Book Online Page B

I’d be wearing, if I’d just have opened a can of seltzer and if I’d drop it or waste time finding a place to put it down, if my heart would stop along with his. I’d imagined it, but it hadn’t come. Now it was here and I was alive.
    What I hadn’t imagined was this eerie stillness of his body. The sudden absence.
    “Joseph?” I said it impatiently, like I was calling him for dinner.
    “He is gone,” Ada said.
    “Gone where?” I said that out loud. Gone to the store. Gone to bed. Gone to heaven. Gone to the store to buy the bed that sits in heaven. Suddenly, I believed in heaven.
    “I will take care of everything,” I whispered, as if words might be enough to lure him back. I promised him that I’d open an Iraqi pastry shop. I lied.
    “We will sell the vanilla cake with pomegranate sauce, the date truffles, the cardamom cookies, the
shakrlama
.” All the things he loved. Things we had served night after night at the restaurant. Things that might have, if anything could have, perked him up, brought him back. I said this as if all of a sudden he might open his eyes and say he’d love a cookie, thank you very much. And I would have raced to the kitchen and there would have been a platter of them, piled high and hot.
    “Everything will be all right,” I said. I was aware of the weight of the sky, the blood careering through my veins, the cold slippery feeling of my feet, a bus somewhere down the street, its long, labored exhale. Lucky breath.
    And then I was saying, “I will find our daughter.” I didn’t care if Ada could hear. She’d known nothing. Now she knew everything. I wasn’t thinking of myself. “I promise,” I said.
    This was where it happened—on a pull-out couch after sunset on a Friday, with the smell of latex gloves in the room, of browning garlic outside, dirty white socks on the floor stiff as old bones, our old old building clanking like a madman was inside the pipes, two books on the shelf tipped toward each other and making room for a vase of dead purple flowers, me on my knees with my face on an unbeating heart while everything else around us continued to move, in its way, or be moved, for something hopeful in the future.
    “I will find her,” I said, meaning it. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. She will love you still.”

Lorca
    I DIDN’T SLEEP a wink. The morning after overhearing my mother reveal her favorite meal of life, I lay in bed, awake before everybody, hoping desperately that a brilliant idea about how to track down the masgouf recipe would dawn on me. My hope was that my mother had written various versions somewhere as she tried to perfect it and stashed away the best one on a tiny piece of paper so all I had to do was find it, master it, and
fini!
that would be that. But there were three problems with this. First, my mother kept very few things. You couldn’t find a single one of my kid drawings or report cards if you tried. I doubt she even had her own Social Security card. Second, what she did keep, she kept in a box below the couch where she slept. Where she was sleeping now. Third, my mother had said that even she couldn’t replicate the dish, so if she’d written it down, and if by some miracle I was able to find it, the odds of my making something halfway decent from that recipe were slim to none. Closer to none.
    Still, hopelessness is about as useful as rotten eggs. I hadn’t had a good idea since the maple bacon and caramelized banana ice cream sandwiches that were now included on the brunch menu at Le Canard Capricieux, and my mother would be home all day, so I told myself that if I was going to do something, I’d better do it now. If I waited till she woke up, I’d wait for hours. When I couldn’t stay in bed any longer, I went into the living room, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled across the floor. If she woke up from my movement, I’d just say I was defuzzing the carpet. Staying flat was harder than I’d expected; my arms