Free If We Lived Here by Lindsey Palmer Page A

employed. But while most of Emma’s Jewish friends shouldered heaps of guilt from their mothers, she found it disturbing that for her it was her brother, just three years older than she, who had taken it upon himself to be the family’s religion monitor. Emma suspected a lot of it was for show, some kind of “keeping up with the Jacobsons” thing. Even their mom, whose business was selling kosher-style pastries to the Jewish Madrileños, poked fun at Max’s and Alysse’s insistence on calling on a Christian neighbor to flip their light switches on and off during Shabbat. If all that weren’t bad enough, it made Emma seethe that, back when their parents had broached the idea of selling their house and shipping out to Europe, Max had pounced; within six months, he’d bought them out and moved himself into the house Emma had grown up calling home. All of the doorframes now bore colorful mezuzahs that Alysse had picked up at JCC craft fairs, and Emma’s niece now slept in her old bedroom, redecorated in Alysse’s matchy-matchy aesthetic. A giant poster of Noah’s ark replaced the photo collage Emma had updated through high school and college and then pleaded with her parents to preserve like a museum display after she’d moved away.
    Emma and Nick did occasionally trek up to Westchester to spend Jewish holidays with her brother’s family. And when she didn’t let herself get worked up over Alysse’s pointed comments—“Isn’t it refreshing to get out of the city and breathe clean air for a change?” “By the time I was your age, the only thing on my mind was babies, babies, babies. It’s funny how people are different.”—Emma did find herself comforted by the old rituals. They gathered around the family room, which Max must’ve lobbied to keep as it was before, and lit the candles. They sang the same songs she and Max had sung as kids, the ancient tunes bursting up like buds from their childhood, lovelier for their deep roots. They tore off chunks of the same fluffy challah from Weintrob’s, sipped at the same syrupy Manischewitz wine, and then took turns sharing a highlight from the past week and a hope for the coming week. This last tradition was a new one, created by Max for his family, and it was sweet, something Emma could imagine Aimee and Caleb might repeat decades down the line with their own future families. Emma didn’t go in for any of the God stuff, and she’d yet to meet anyone who was anything but horribly scarred from their childhood Hebrew school experience, but she could see the appeal of this weekly touchstone, the ritual coming together of family for an official day of rest.
    Considering Max’s Shabbat ritual made Emma wonder what kinds of rituals she and Nick would create now that they’d be living together. When Annie had moved to an old apartment, she’d brought in a feng shui expert to perform a move-in ceremony with incense and yoga and, much to Emma’s amusement, Annie had followed the instructions and repeated the procedure each full moon thereafter. Now Annie and Eli practiced mindful meditation each morning. (Annie was flexible in her spirituality.) Emma knew her parents had a bimonthly tradition of compiling care packages of sweets and Spanish tchotchkes to send to their kids, their intercontinental expression of parental love. And Genevieve had once confessed to a post-one-night-stand ritual of flooding her room with musky incense and Drake tunes in order to seal in what she called her “sexual mojo.”
    Emma began dreaming up new traditions for her and Nick—a weekly Scrabble tournament at the breakfast nook overlooking Grand Army Plaza, or a shelf in each of the his-and-hers closets where they’d leave little trinkets for each other. But wait. She bolted up in her seat, remembering that that particular home had vanished. She and Nick were back to square one. Acid anxiety swirled through Emma’s stomach. She breathed deeply, willing herself to feel a hint of