Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Your books?” he asked.

  “My books,” I told him, half shy, half defiant. No point in denying it now, I figured. Plus, if Remy Heymsfeld spent ten seconds online, he’d find it all out anyhow. “Writing’s a really great job for a mother,” I said enthusiastically, leaving aside the question of whether it was a job that I had anymore. “The hours are very flexible. When Joy was little, I’d write when she was napping.” Remy nodded and wrote something in our folder. I leaned closer—like any ex-reporter worth her salt, I could read upside down—but couldn’t make out the words.

  “Thank you both for your time,” he said after he’d tucked our folder back into his briefcase. “I can’t say anything official until after the review, but . . .” My heart stopped. Peter squeezed my hand. “You two seem like ideal candidates,” Remy concluded, his unlined face wreathed in a cheerful smile. I felt myself relax as Remy extended his hand for Peter, then me, to shake. “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about at all.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Hi,” I said to the lady sitting behind the desk. It was three-thirty on Sunday afternoon, and I was standing in the hallway of the Ronald McDonald House, which smelled like potpourri and Lysol and, underneath, very faintly, like pee. “I’m Joy Krushelevansky? I’m here to volunteer? For my mitzvah project?”

  The lady held up one finger, then pointed at the telephone. “Sure . . . uh-huh . . . the social worker will be in touch.” Then she pulled off her headset. “Hi!” she said, smiling at me with her big red wet-looking lipsticky mouth. “I’m Debbie Marshall, one of the house coordinators.” The telephone rang. She frowned at it, pushed a button, and got to her feet. “Here, why don’t you hang up your stuff? I bet we could use you in the kitchen!”

  She showed me a closet, where I set down my coat and my shopping bag, then led me to a kitchen that smelled like disinfectant, with a linoleum floor and a gigantic stainless-steel refrigerator and an eight-burner stove. There were two more big refrigerators along one wall, two dishwashers, and two sinks, both filled with breakfast dishes. I saw crusts from toast and floating soggy Cheerios in a puddle of milk at the bottom of a blue-and-white bowl.

  Debbie sounded apologetic as she said, “Do you mind? We’re at capacity right now. Six families. People are supposed to clean up after themselves, but . . .”

  It took me a minute to figure out what she wanted. “Oh, no problem.” I found a pair of yellow rubber gloves and pulled them on. I opened one of the dishwashers, turning on the hot water, finding the sponge and the dish soap. Doing dishes was better than what I’d been worried I’d have to do, which was talking to sick children, or the families of sick children, because what in the world would I say to them?

  I thought of the shopping bag in the closet and smiled. It had been easy. So easy. Today had been the first time I’d seen Bruce since our scene at Tyler’s bar mitzvah, and he’d treated me like I’d break at the first hard look or sharp word. When I got into the car, he asked what I wanted to do instead of telling me what our plans were. When I asked to go shopping, he agreed and drove us to the Cherry Hill Mall. “Joy,” he’d said after pulling into the parking lot. “I want you to know that in spite of what happened between me and your mother, or what you might have overheard, or what you might have read—”

  I cut him off. “It’s okay. It’s totally fine. I’m fine.” I hadn’t missed the look of relief on his face.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, bending over to unbuckle Max from his booster seat. “Because look, the truth is—”

  I so did not want to know the truth, especially not his version of it. “It’s fine,” I repeated, and took Max’s hand. “Can we have money for a snack?”

  Bruce did what I knew he’d do, what he always did: pulled his wallet out of his pocket and flipped it to me. “Help yourself.” His wallet was a mess, bulging with old ATM receipts and business cards and credit cards and three expired driver’s licenses. I pulled out five dollars. Then I pulled out a MasterCard, looking up quickly to see if Bruce was watching, which he wasn’t. I stuck the card in my pocket. I took Max on the kiddie train, and when the boys asked if they could go see a movie, and Bruce looked at me with his eyebrows raised, I said, “Why don’t you go ahead. I can just look around here.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, clearly relieved, and I said that I was. The movie lasted an hour and a half, which was more than enough time. The dress I found wasn’t exactly the same as the one I’d bought with Aunt Elle—the pink was a shade or two darker and the beading on the straps and hem was different, but it was close enough, and I didn’t even flinch as I slapped Bruce’s card on the counter. Let him pay, I thought. He should pay. I’m his daughter. I waited for him to ask about the bag when he picked me up in front of the Build-a-Bear workshop, but Max was whining and Leo was pestering Bruce about some music he’d wanted to buy, and it was the easiest thing in the world to shove the credit card into the backseat pocket of Bruce’s brand-new car on our way out of the parking lot.

  I was rinsing glasses and stacking them in the top rack of one of the Ronald McDonald House’s dishwashers when a girl in overalls and pink rag wool socks wandered into the kitchen. I followed her out of the corner of my eye as she pulled up a chair at the kitchen table, which was round and had enough room for ten. She sat there, watching me wash dishes. Say something? Say nothing? Finally, I turned off the water and pulled off my gloves. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Joy.”

  She looked me up and down. “Do you work here?”

  “I’m a volunteer.” Did I look old enough to work here? To work anywhere? The girl had light brown skin. Her hair was in two puffy pigtails, she had big round brown eyes, and she wore a pink-and-white-striped shirt under her blue overalls. I thought she was maybe ten or eleven, so maybe I did look old enough to her.

  “You talk funny,” she said.

  “I do not!”

  “Yes, you do,” said the girl. “Your voice is all . . .” She dropped her own voice until it was a low, raspy growl. “Like this.”

  I did a quick check to make sure my hearing aids were still in place. Then I folded the dish towel I’d been using and hung it neatly over the oven handle. “For your information,” I said, taking care to say every syllable precisely, “I just have a husky voice. I do not talk funny.”

  “You got hearing aids?”

  I smoothed my hair down tight against my cheeks, frowning.

  “My grandmother has them, too.”

  Great. “Are you sick?” I asked. If she was sick, if she had cancer or something awful, if all that puffy brown hair was a wig, then maybe I’d cut her some slack, but if she wasn’t, I was going to march right back to Lipstick Debbie and ask for another assignment.

  “Not me,” said the girl. “My brother. He’s doing chemo.”

  “Oh.”

  “Probably he’ll die,” said the girl.

  “Oh,” I said, and tugged at my hair again.

  Lipstick Debbie stuck her head around the corner. “Cara? Did you finish up your homework?”

  “Yeah,” said Cara, only she sighed it more than she said it.

  “And the dishes are all done,” I said.

  “Great! Thanks!” I could tell that Debbie was trying, and failing, to remember my name. “You know what?” she said. “I never gave you the tour!”

  “I’ll show her around,” Cara volunteered.

  Debbie raised her eyebrows. Out in the hallway, the telephone rang again, and I heard the front door open and close. “Well, if you’re sure.”

  “Sure I’m sure,” said Cara. Then she muttered, “It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do.” She padded down the hall toward the staircase, and I followed her.

  “Dining room,” said Cara, pointing at a room with a long table and kids’ artwork in colored plastic frames on the wall. “Den,” she said. This room had a collection of couches that didn’t match, a big TV set mounted on the wall, and more works in crayon and finger-paint. I also saw a few plaqu
es on the wall, probably to thank the people who’d donated the couches or the TV. “Bathroom.” The bathroom had a chemical smell, and there were stainless-steel grab bars around the toilet. A red plastic trash can with a sign that read BIO-HAZARD stood in the corner next to the regular trash can, and there was a printed notice about handwashing taped up next to the mirror. “Playroom.” This was a room with high windows, and more couches, and window seats. There was a little puppet theater in one corner, next to a cardboard trunk of ratty dress-up clothes, beanbag chairs, and shelves full of books, a low table with three small chairs covered in construction paper and little-kid scissors, and on a metal desk in the corner, a computer. Where are Cara’s parents? I wondered. Why is she here all by herself?

  Then I looked at the computer, and I had another idea. “Hey,” I said casually. “Do you know if that’s online?”

  She gave a combination nod/shrug.

  “Do you think I could send a quick e-mail?”

  Another nod/shrug. Cara plopped down on a red beanbag and stared at me as I sat on the wheeled chair and tapped the mouse until the computer’s screen came alive. I was thinking about Bruce, the way he’d kissed Max’s forehead after putting him back in his car seat. I was thinking about Tyler, standing on the bimah with his mother squeezing him against her chest and his father’s hand on his shoulder. I thought about the sled in our garage, my mother’s name written along one of the wooden slats in a stranger’s handwriting, and the voice I’d heard on the tape.

  I erased the Ronald McDonald House home page, decorated with a slide show of happy, healthy-looking families, and opened my account.

  Cara watched from her beanbag. “Who are you writing to?” she asked. “You got a boyfriend?”

  “Ha. No.” I opened another window and plugged in my best guess at the address that would lead me to my mysterious grandfather. The Beverly Hills Surgical Centre had a very fancy website, with video downloads of its most popular procedures and podcast interviews with the surgeons. I didn’t bother with any of that. Dr. Lawrence Shapiro had his picture on the “Our Physicians” page. With his curly white hair and silvery beard, he looked like an older version of the man I’d seen in Grandma Ann’s photo albums. He didn’t look like someone who’d force his daughter to stand on a scale in front of her family, or throw an ice skate at her, or moo when his wife bent over. He looked like the man I’d heard on the tape, kind and patient with little girls.

  Click to e-mail our physicians, said the link. I clicked and wrote, Dear Dr. Shapiro, my name is Joy Shapiro Krushelevansky. My mother’s name is Candace, and I think she may be your daughter.

  I stared at the words as the cursor blinked. Then I backspaced over “may be” and typed in “is.”

  My bat mitzvah is in November, and if you are my grandfather I would like to invite you. It will be at the Center City Synagogue at 10 A.M., with a luncheon to follow. If you send me your address I will be happy to send you an invitation.

  I typed my name and my e-mail address. Not a very nice guy, my mother and Aunt Elle had said. But maybe they’d been wrong. Maybe the tape I’d heard told the real story. Maybe time had changed him. Maybe I could introduce him to everyone at my bat mitzvah. “This is my grandfather.” Not This is my, um, Bruce or This is my father and then, later, having to explain that Peter wasn’t really; or This is my grandmother’s partner, Mona, and watching people get weird or way too friendly. Just something nice and simple and true: This is my grandfather.

  P.S., I wrote. If you aren’t the Dr. Shapiro who is Candace Shapiro’s father, I’m sorry. I hit send, feeling almost cheerful, then turned back to Cara. “So what do you want to do?”

  “Why do you talk funny?” she answered.

  I pushed myself away from the desk and sat down on a yellow beanbag, opposite from hers. “I was born two and a half months early, and the nerves that carry sound from my ears to my brain didn’t develop enough. But I don’t talk funny. People can understand me fine.”

  “Huh.” There was a hole in Cara’s pink sock. The two of us stared at it for the minute it took for her to work her big toe through it. “Do you go to school while you’re here?” I asked.

  “I have a tutor.”

  “Oh.” I watched for a minute while Cara wriggled another toe through the hole in her sock. Her toenails were long and ragged-looking, like nobody had cut them in weeks. “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do that,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I got more socks.”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall. Four-thirty, which meant another hour and a half of this. “Do you like it here?”

  Another shrug. “It’s okay.”

  “Do you miss your friends?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you want to do something?”

  She looked at me. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. What’s there to do around here?”

  “Well.” Cara got to her feet. She didn’t exactly look enthusiastic, but at least she was moving. She pointed to a stack of board games, their cardboard boxes softened by overhandling, stuck together with silver tape. “There’s Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders. Boring. Origami,” she said, pointing at the squares of brightly colored paper, brilliant orange and pink and green. “We can make cranes. Which I’ve already done about a million times. Want to watch a movie?”

  “Are you allowed to watch movies?” In my house, whenever I asked about watching a movie on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, my mother asked if I wouldn’t rather go for a walk or on a bike ride. Then she’d offer to go on the walk or the bike ride with me. I don’t even ask anymore.

  “Joy.” I was startled when Cara said my name, surprised that she knew what it was, until I remembered that I’d told her. “Nobody here cares what I do.”

  If I was an actual grown-up, I would have said something like Of course people care or Your parents care or maybe even I care what you do. But I hadn’t had my bat mitzvah yet, so I let myself off the hook. “Are you hungry? Do you want to make popcorn?”

  I asked Debbie’s permission—she was on the phone again, and gave me a quick thumbs-up without missing a word of her conversation. We found popcorn in the kitchen, kernels in a jar, not the microwave kind. Cara studied the jar suspiciously, unscrewing the top and sniffing it, then taking out a kernel and rolling it between her fingers.

  I took the jar back and read the directions out loud. “We’ll need a big pan with a lid . . .”

  “I got that.” Cara pulled a pan out of a drawer with a flourish and a bang.

  “Oil . . .”

  “Top cabinet. I can’t reach.”

  I stood on my tiptoes and got it. “Salt and butter.”

  “Here and here,” she said, slamming the first and setting the second down on the counter beside me. I poured oil in the pan, flicked on the burner, and waited for it to get hot while Cara stood beside me, bouncing impatiently from foot to foot.

  “I did popcorn like this one time, at camp last summer, only that was in a pan over a fire,” Cara said.

  “Did it work?”

  “Yeah, it was really good.”

  When the oil was spitting, I let Cara toss one kernel into the pan. She squealed when it popped out and flew right at her face. “Ow! Hot,” she said, brushing at her cheek.

  “Be careful,” I said. I made her wear an oven mitt to pour the rest of the kernels into the pan, and then I found a stool so she could stand in front of the stove, holding the handle and shaking it. I melted butter in the microwave, dumped the popcorn into a bowl, and poured the butter on top. Cara shook the salt. I found paper napkins and a pitcher of some kind of juice and a tray to put everything on. We carried it all into the den. Cara rummaged through a stack of DVDs and found The Little Mermaid, which I’d watched when I was little, and we sat down on one of the couches with the bowl between us. Ursula the sea witch was just starting her big number when Cara spoke.

  “Harry.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s my brother’s
name. Harry.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now I admit that once or twice / Someone couldn’t pay the price / And I’m afraid I had to rake ’em ’cross the coals,” Ursula sang.

  “It’s totally stupid,” Cara said. Her eyes were still focused on the TV, the blue glow of the movie flickering across her face, her hand dipping automatically into the popcorn bowl and lifting fistfuls of kernels to her mouth. “He doesn’t even have any hair anymore.” I turned my head away because I thought she might have been crying, and I thought there should have been something for me to do about that, but I couldn’t think of what.

  And then I did. “Hey,” I said. “Do you want to try on the most beautiful dress in the entire world?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  By the first Friday in June, the weather had turned freakishly cold. Some kind of low-pressure air mass had blown down from Canada overnight, dropping the temperatures from the eighties down to the fifties, half killing the petunias in my window boxes. Green leaves skittered down the sidewalks and iron-gray clouds scudded across the sky. I could already feel the beginnings of a cold—the scratchiness at the back of my throat, the dull ache behind my eyes. I chugged down a pint of water and a mug of rose-hip tea, popped vitamin C tablets, and looked up my beef stew recipe. If I hustled, I could get a piece of chuck at Chef’s Market, a baguette and salad greens and a blueberry tart for dessert, get the stew simmering, then pick Joy up from school.

  I tucked a basket of clean clothes against my hip and carried it up to Joy’s room, noticing as the door swung open that, angry as she was, she was at least keeping her bed made and her clothes off the floor. That was good. Not good enough to offset the fact that she’d barely spoken to me in the past two weeks, but still, not nothing. I’d tried to bring up the topic of Big Girls Don’t Cry, telling her that if she ever wanted to talk to me, if she ever had any questions, if there was ever anything that concerned her . . . I’d let my voice trail off, and I’d waited, tense, barely breathing, as Joy looked at me blandly and told me everything was fine.