While We're Far Apart by Lynn Austin Read Free Book Online Page A

never spoken disrespectfully to her parents in her life. She had felt so courageous when she awoke this morning, but now the cereal she had just eaten churned in her stomach like the agitator on a washing machine. She needed to leave right now, before her mother made her feel any more frightened than she already was.
    She slipped her purse strap over her head and across her chest the way her mother had taught her, so that purse-snatchers couldn’t grab it, and picked up the two shopping bags that held her belongings. Neither Penny nor her parents owned a suitcase. None of them ever traveled.
    “I’m going now. I’ll see you in a few days.”
    “Wait!”
    Penny obeyed, turning back to face her mother.
    “You’re such a scatterbrain, Penny. Stop and think for a minute before you go running off like a fool. Do you have everything you need? Enough money for the bus? The directions to get there? And you’d better put your sweater on; it looks chilly outside.”
    Tears squeezed Penny’s throat. “I’ll be fine, Mother. Goodbye.”
    She closed the door behind her and walked to the bus stop as fast as she could with the heavy shopping bags. Penny didn’t own very many clothes and figured she could bring them over a few at a time when she came home to visit on the weekends. Eddie didn’t own a car. He had drawn the bus route for her, explaining which one to take and where the stops were.
    The first bus that pulled up to the curb was hers. It seemed very crowded for a Saturday morning, and nearly all the passengers were servicemen. A young man in a U.S. Marines uniform sitting near the front jumped up when she boarded and gave her his seat. She thanked him and sat down by the window to watch for street signs and landmarks. Twenty minutes later she reached her stop. According to Eddie’s directions, she only had to walk one block to his apartment. She felt proud of herself for not getting lost or being accosted, the two things her mother had fearfully predicted would happen.
    The storefronts and signs in Eddie’s neighborhood had a lot of Jewish names and Hebrew lettering on them. She walked past several men with black hats and beards and felt a ripple of fear. Her father had warned her that a lot of Jews lived in this part of Brooklyn. At last she rounded the corner onto Eddie’s street, then halted in surprise when she saw the burned-out building in front of her. Part of the roof had caved in, and black soot smudged the tan-colored brick around its broken windows. The air smelled like a bonfire. Was that Eddie’s apartment? She hurried forward, searching for his house number, finally finding it on the building across the street from the fire.
    The sight of the ravaged building shook Penny. What if Eddie’s apartment caught on fire that way? What would she do? How would she and the kids escape from their bedrooms way up on the third floor? Maybe she had been wrong to take on so much responsibility. Maybe her mother had been right.
    But no, Eddie was counting on her. Penny hurried up the steps to the narrow front porch and rang the doorbell with E. Shaffer printed beside it. A moment later she heard footsteps tromping down the inside stairs. Eddie opened the door. He looked relieved to see her.
    “Hi. You found us.”
    “Yeah, I made it here just fine. Your directions were great.”
    “Let me take your bags.”
    He led her inside the small, smoky foyer, and she saw right away that the steps to Eddie’s apartment on the second floor were much too steep for his mother to go up and down every day, especially with her rheumatism. Penny herself was puffing by the time she climbed to the top of them.
    “Our landlord lives downstairs,” Eddie explained as they climbed, “and we have the second and third floors. Make sure the kids don’t jump around the living room too much and bother him.” Eddie opened a second door at the top of the stairs, where Penny saw his suitcase, packed and ready to go, standing in the small