“Oh, well, thanks,” he says unhappily as he takes the bag.
“I know you might not understand this now, but maybe someday you will. My granddaughter, Ellie, I know she had a wonderful time being with you. She told me herself.”
“She did?” He perks up slightly.
“She did. It was very difficult to do what she did, to leave you in the middle of the night like that.”
“I just couldn’t understand it.” He slumps in his chair. “I know everything was sudden. I know from your point of view, you’re wondering how two people only knowing each other for a day could feel so strongly about each other.” He pauses. “But I did.”
I stop him. “You don’t have to explain it to me. I know exactly what you’re talking about. The two of you had a profound connection. It has nothing to do with how long you knew each other.”
“I thought you might think it was childish to feel that way.”
“Naivete is one thing. Knowing what’s right is completely different,” I tell him.
“So then what happened?” he asks, grasping for words. “Why did she leave like that?”
I have gone over the answer to this question a million times through the night. In the end, the answer is simple: “Zachary, in Ellie’s case . . . Ellie had responsibilities. She thought she could run away from them. We all think we can, don’t we? In the end, she just couldn’t. She knew she had to learn to accept them.”
“I don’t understand. Did she have a family?”
“Yes.” I exhale. “She has a family.”
“And Howard?” he asks.
“She loves Howard very much. Whether she could admit it or not, she loves Howard, and will always love Howard. But what she really needed was just one day off from life to think about everything. So she came here to Philadelphia, she enlisted Lucy as her accomplice, and she set out to live one day in her life free of responsibility. It was supposed to be a fun day, doing things she hadn’t done in a long time. All of it was supposed to have nothing to do with real life. Instead, something happened. She met you.”
“Is that what she told you?” he asks.
“She didn’t have to tell me anything.”
“So then why did she leave?” he asks again.
“She wasn’t going to. She was all set to do just that, change her life and start all over again. The problem is—and, thankfully, you don’t have to know this yet—but . . . sometimes you can’t change what’s already set in stone. She had her doubts, but the truth is, Howard is her one and only. Her family is what matters to her most, and Howard is the one she built it with. Taking that one day off from life, that’s what made her realize it. You have to know, though, for as much as she needed to leave, she also wanted to stay. Sometimes you have no choice in life but to stay where you are and work it out.”
“You know, I did have the feeling she was still with Howard.” He nods.
“Oh, she is,” I reiterate. “For better or worse, she’ll always be with Howard.” And then I say something that even makes me stop for a second: “Howard is her soul mate.” And as the words come out of my mouth, I know they are the truth.
My question has been answered. Who is my soul mate? For better or for worse, it will always be Howard Jerome.
“Actually, I knew it because of something she said to me.”
“And what was that?” I ask, wondering what it was I could have said.
“She told me she had regrets about her life.”
My hand starts to shake so I put it under the table, hoping he won’t notice.
“And I told her,” he continues, “that she’s young, she’s got a lot of years to make up for something she might have regretted.”
It is the third time in a week I’ve heard this said to me. And for the first time, I really heard it. For the first time in a week, I smile.
“Thank you for giving Ellie such a gift,” I tell him.
“What do you mean?” he asks with a perplexed look on his face.
“Zachary, I want you to hear me when I say this, and I don’t want you to ever forget it.”
“Okay.”
I take a deep breath. “The night she spent with you is something she will never forget. You gave her a second chance at her life. I know that it’s something she will always take with her,” I tell him, tears in my eyes. “Sure, she’s with Howard, but you will always be in her heart.”
“Well, I appreciate that,” he tells me, tears coming to his eyes as well.
I go into my bag and pull out the travel-size package of tissues I always carry around. I hand him one and then use one myself.
“Thank you.” He sighs as he wipes his eyes.
“No, thank you,” I tell him.
“For what?”
“For Ellie’s night.”
“You’re welcome,” he says softly.
We sit for a moment dabbing our eyes. I know that what I have said has helped him. I know now that everything will be all right.
“So?” I say, dabbing my eyes one last time and exhaling deeply. “You think they’ve got pancakes here? I’m suddenly very hungry.”
“You know, I don’t think they do, but that sounds good to me. I haven’t eaten a lot in the last few days, and I’m suddenly hungry, too. I know a place that makes great pancakes a couple blocks from here, if you’ve got the time,” he says.
“As it happens, I do have the time.” I smile. “Does the place you’re thinking of happen to have an outdoor café? It’s such a beautiful day to sit out in the sun. It would do you good to get some sun. You look like you’ve been cramped up in your apartment for days.”
“Actually, I have. That’s a good idea,” he says, getting up from his chair and helping me up from mine.
“You know, Mrs. Jerome . . . Ellie,” he says as he places his elbow out for me to take hold. “Thank you for your wisdom. I really needed it.”
I lock my arm in his as we begin to leave.
“Zachary,” I say, looking at this young man. “When you get to be my age, that’s the best compliment a person could receive.”
“Mrs. Jerome, you’re also a very cool lady.”
“Lucy says that, too,” I say emphatically, beaming.
“By the way, there’s something I’ve been meaning to mention,” he says, holding the door for me.
“What’s that?”
“How weird is it that you and your granddaughter have the same name and you both fell in love with guys named Howard?”
“I know,” I say, adding, “crazy coincidence, isn’t it?”
seventy-six
I’m seventy-six today.
And that’s fine with me.
I didn’t do much in terms of my birthday today. I had other things to do.
Tonight was the engagement party, and it was more than my pleasure to throw it. As usual, The Prime Rib did a fabulous job. The coffee was just right, and the crab cakes were sublime. My salmon was cooked to perfection. Barbara ate every last bit of her steak.
Frida didn’t want much in the way of a grand party, but I begged to differ. How many times do you get to throw your best girlfriend an engagement party?
Well, I got to do it twice. The first time with Sol, all those years ago, and the second time tonight, for Frida and Hershel.
“Mom, make sure The Prime Rib has enough candles,” Barbara called me this morning to tell me. “Frida wants the whole thing by candlelight, and you know your friends will complain they can’t see their food.”
“Barbara,” I told her, “I’ve got the situation under control.”
Some things never change, do they?
Or do they?
“That’s all I wanted to remind you,” she said. “It’s going to be a gorgeous night,” she added.
I honestly didn’t think anyone would even remember my birthday. Lucy has Frida coming in for so many fittings for her wedding dress I don’t know how she doesn’t get lost in remembering what gets taken in here and what gets let out there. I w
ork in Lucy’s office a few days a week, helping her with buyer’s meetings. When Frida came in the other day I told her to stop losing so much weight, but she says she can’t help it now, with all the exercise she and Hershel do. Believe me, you don’t want to know what kind of exercise they’re doing. She’s like a schoolgirl, though, when she gives me the dirty details, so I listen to what she wants to tell me. Trust me, it will be good when Hershel finally makes an honest woman out of her.
“Ellie,” she said to me one day, “I want you to find happiness with as nice a man as I have.”
Don’t think I won’t. There’s even someone I’ve had my eye on. I see him in the park when I’m sitting out in the sun. Don’t worry, he’s my age. I actually knew his wife, Leona Price. Such a shame she died—Alzheimer’s. I would hear from my girlfriends about the way he took care of her until she passed on. I used to see the two of them at cocktail parties and other events through the years. He always seemed like a very nice man, and when he approached me in the park that first day I was more than happy to talk to him. Who knows? Maybe I’ll ask him to be my date for the wedding.
I have to say that I loved how all of us looked tonight. We all wore outfits from Lucy’s summer collections. You know, she now also does a line for the over-fifty set. If you had told me one year ago that my Lucy would have two successful clothing lines . . . Well, I would have believed you. And best of all, she gets 75 percent of everything the stores sell!
Did I mention the name of Lucy’s other line?
Ellie. Just, simply, Ellie.
I’m so proud of Lucy. She never fails to make my heart sing.
Every now and then Lucy and I will be sitting in my apartment, eating our secret meal—though these days we’re off the cookie-dough ice cream and on to rocky road—and one of us will bring up something from that fateful day. It always ends with one of us regretting not buying the one thing I wanted.
We never got the underwear.
So what happened to Zachary? He went on, like I said he would. He’s dating a very nice girl now, and I’m proud to say that I’m the one who set them up. She’s Elaine Shipley’s granddaughter. I happened to run into Elaine at the pedicurist one day and she was mentioning how good-natured and attractive her granddaughter Claire was, but all these men seemed to just take advantage. I hadn’t seen a picture of Claire; I didn’t need to. I just saw in Elaine’s eyes what I had in my eyes for Lucy. A lot of younger folks think their grandparents just hear that two people are single so we set them up. Hey, kids, the joke’s on you. We’ve got more wisdom than that.
The other week I had Lucy and Johnny and Zachary and Claire over for dinner—I like to give them all a home-cooked meal sometimes. Zachary walked over to the piano, where he saw the picture of Lucy and Ellie Michele. There was a lot of talking going on around the table. Johnny and Claire were in a heated discussion over something; I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening. My attention had turned to Zachary as he took the picture in his hand and looked at it for a moment. It was just few moments that he had that picture in his hand. He gave a little smile, and then he put it back and looked at the other pictures.
I know he still thinks of her. I think of her, too.
Sometimes he’ll ask me, “By the way, how is Ellie doing?”
“She’s very happy,” I tell him.
You know, life is funny.
The truth is this: in my life, I did the best I could. Are there regrets? Sure, there’re always regrets, but there’re a lot of truly wonderful things that outweigh the regrets.
Those are the things I like to think about now.
If you don’t believe me, look back to when you first met me. Look at all the things I regretted not doing. If you look back at that one day I got to have, you’ll see what I did. I did everything I always wanted to do.
I made a difference in Lucy’s work.
I got to experience Lucy’s world.
I got to learn new things, to see the world in a way I hadn’t seen it in a very long time.
I got to remember what it’s like to feel physically beautiful again.
I got to fall in love one more time, and experience the bliss and heartbreak that come with it.
And if there’s anything I learned from that day it’s that I can still do all of those things, even at seventy-six.
Am I still jealous of Lucy?
In some ways I’ll always be a little envious, but only because of the era in which Lucy gets to experience her age. That’s the one thing I’ll never be able to experience, no matter what age my body looks. My mind is a product of my generation. In my entire day of being twenty-nine, that’s the one thing that never changed. My body was twenty-nine, but other than that, I was still the same person. Lucy’s mind belongs to her generation. That will never change. So really, if I think about it, I’m not jealous. I’m just a proud grandmother.
But through it all, I still had one question in my mind, something I needed to find out. And I did.
I loved Howard Jerome.
I loved him with all my heart.
It’s a nice thing to finally be able to say this without a doubt in the world.
No marriage is perfect, just like no vacation is perfect. Sometimes it rains, sometimes your hotel room faces the parking lot. When you look back on it, though, when you really start to think about it, those are the things that don’t amount to much in the big picture.
So tonight, after the dinner, and after the speeches, Frida and Lucy and Barbara suddenly appeared with a cake for me. It was such a nice surprise, and so unexpected. The cake was from The Swiss Pastry Shop, of course. This time, though, there was only one candle on the cake, which was provided by the restaurant. It wasn’t that Barbara didn’t want to get seventy-six candles. She did, she actually bought them and intended to put all seventy-six on my cake. There was just so much going on what with the engagement party and getting herself and Larry dressed and out of the house that she simply forgot the candles and left them at home. All of my girlfriends and I had a big laugh about it as we welcomed Barbara to the menopause club.
“I’d let you know where the meetings take place,” I joked as we all broke into hysterics, “but I can’t remember where they are.”
“I hope they’re in the freezer section at Whole Foods!” Barbara joked back as she fanned away yet another hot flash.
As they placed the cake in front of me and everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” I closed my eyes.
“Make a wish!” Frida called out.
“NO!” Lucy shouted. No one understood why, of course, except the two of us. I glanced at her and gave her a sign that she shouldn’t worry. As if a wish on a candle could turn a person’s life back forty-six years.
And as I closed my eyes again, I wished. I wished that the rest of my days will be lived in serenity. I wished the same for those I love.
And that is exactly what I wish for you.
My dear. May you have everything you want in your life. If you should get it all, however, and you still don’t like the outcome, don’t take it as failure. Take it as something to learn from and move on. Believe me, no matter how old you may be, whether you’re twenty-nine or seventy-six, no matter how many years you’ve got left, trust someone who had to learn it the hard way: you’ve still got time to change.
And that, my friend, is my lesson for today.
acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank the amazing seventy-something women I interviewed for this book. Your generosity, honesty, and frankness were more than I could ever have asked for. I hope I’ve done you proud in creating a character that captures the best of who you are.
To Trish Todd, whose spot-on edits made me see the light. Thank you so much for all you’ve done, and to everyone at Touchstone/Fireside for all your hard work, for which I am forever grateful. I also want to send my heartfelt thanks to Trish Grader, for bringing me into the fold.
An eternal thank-you to Brian DeFiore, who through the years h
as gone beyond just being my agent to become my shrink, a shoulder to lean on, chief movie critic, and all-around partner in crime. And thanks of course to Kate Garrick, Melissa Moy, and Adam Schear, who are always so kind and never seem exasperated with all my queries.
To one of my closest friends and my lawyer, Eric Brooks, for threatening to beat up the other kids if they tried to steal my lunch money. Metaphorically, of course.
To my Hollywood agent, Brian Lipson, whom I enjoy chit-chatting with more than many of my girlfriends. And when it comes to business, you do your job so fabulously well.
As always, I bear a debt of gratitude to Susan Swimmer, Lesley Jane Seymour, Erin Moore, and Allison Dickens. Without you, oh, heavens, I don’t know where I’d be.
I send lots of love to the Berg-Goldsteins, who from the start have treated me like one of their own, and only cringed slightly when I reminded you I might one day be your matriarch.
To my big brothers, David and Michael, and my sister-in-law, Samantha, because when I’m seventy-five, you’ll still be referring to me as “Baby Deans.” To my cousin Michele, who, like me, knows the importance of taking a day. And to my niece Noa, because I am already so proud of who you are.
And finally and most especially to my father, Barry Halpern, and my husband, Jonathan Goldstein, who share the most valuable trait of all. As long as I live, I will never know two men with more love in their hearts for the women in their lives.
TOUCHSTONE
Reading Group Guide
29
Haunted by the death of her husband and the unresolved problems of their marriage, Ellie Jerome makes a wish on her seventy-fifth birthday to be twenty-nine again, just for one day. When she wakes up the next morning and finds that her wish has come true, it turns her whole world upside down. She sets out to have a day without responsibilities or worries in the company of her twenty-five-year-old granddaughter Lucy, never imagining the consequences of her wish.
When Ellie’s daughter, Barbara, and best friend, Frida, find that she has disappeared without explanation, they form an unlikely team determined to find out what is going on. Over the course of one unusual day, the women each come to terms with what it means to be family, and discover that it is never too late to start your life over.
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