Free Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner Page A

my friends had gone, even though I’d begged her, but at my pediatrician’s office, “just to be on the safe side,” she’d said. Even though I’d been doing well for the last year and a half, I still had to be careful about infections. The morning of the service, she’d brought me to her beauty parlor, where Annette, who did her hair, had done mine, using a round brush to blow it out perfectly straight. I’d gotten a manicure, my first, and my mom had even let Annette curl my lashes and put on a little mascara and some pink lip gloss. The whole time, she’d sat in the waiting area, watching me in the mirrors, sometimes with her hands pressed together over her heart, sometimes sniffling a little bit, which should have been a warning, if I’d only paid attention.
    The service had started at ten o’clock. The sanctuary wasn’t packed the way it was on High Holidays, when every seat, even the ones in the balcony, would be taken, but the first ten rows were full, with aunts and uncles and cousins, my nana’s sister, my great-aunt Florence, and her husband, Si, my father’s two brothers and their wives and all of their kids. My friends sat together, Kara and Marissa and Kelsey and Britt and Josh S. and Josh M. and Derek and Ross, plus every kid in my Hebrew-school class. My parents were in the front row. My mom wore a rose-colored suit, a pleated silk skirt that fell to her knees, and a jacket that buttoned up tightly enough to show her shape, and high heels that matched, and my father and Jonah both wore dark suits and ties. Up on the bimah, holding the heavy ­sterling-silver pointer, moving the finger over each Hebrew word, I’d been so nervous that my knees had almost been knocking together, but once I’d made it through the first blessings I started to calm down, and I sang the prayers and chanted my portion and read my speech almost perfectly. The subject of my Torah portion was sex offenses—which, as Rabbi Silver said, did not lend itself naturally to a bat mitzvah speech. Together, we’d decided that I could talk about rules in general—which ones we should follow, which ones we should question, which biblical injunctions made sense in the 1990s and which could stand what Rabbi Silver called “some interrogation.”
    By the time I’d finished my legs felt wobbly, but from relief instead of nerves, and I was excited for the party, which would be held in the social hall as soon as the service was over. Twenty round tables for ten were waiting, draped in pink and silver cloths, with pink and white hydrangeas in silver bowls at each of the adult tables and dozens of pink and silver balloons at the kids’ tables. There would be passed appetizers and then the grown-ups would get chicken or salmon and the kids would have a taco bar, and there’d be a disc jockey and six dancers, three boys and three girls, to lead us in the line dances and the games.
    Rabbi Silver had given a speech, and then Mrs. Nussbaum from the Sisterhood had presented me with gold candlesticks and a copy of the Gates of Prayer. My parents and Jonah and I had stood together, huddled underneath my father’s prayer shawl, as the rabbi read a special blessing. “And now,” he’d said, “if Rachel’s parents, Bernard and Helen, would like to say a few words?”
    I had expected my father to make the speech. When my parents had come up for their aliyah, my mom had been crying, and her voice was so faint when she sang the blessings over the Torah that finally the cantor had just shifted the microphone toward my dad. But then, as I’d watched, my dad had put his hand on the small of my mother’s back and given her a little push, propelling her forward so that she almost bumped into the fringed blue velvet that covered the bimah. She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, unfolded it, adjusted the microphone, and cleared her