Free Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb Page A

attractive and desirable, that she’d had this whole other exciting, romantic life, as I hoped I would someday.
    â€œGreta’s father’s Moshe?” I said. “Or Harry with the sports car?”
    My mother laughed. “No, no. This was the first boyfriend I ever had. Rolf—Rolf Stein.”
    Rolf. I peppered her with questions. She’d known him since she was my age, growing up in Washington Heights; unlike her family, who’d escaped to America at the beginning of the war, Rolf’s had gone to Holland. His parents hid him in a Dutch orphanage, and he never heard from them again.
    â€œWe were engaged when I was eighteen,” my mother said. “But before we could get married, he wanted some proofthat his parents were actually dead. He’d had this hope, all those years, that they might still be alive. He left for Europe then—Germany, Holland, France, Russia. This long search. He found someone who’d known them in Amsterdam, someone who thought they’d been sent to Treblinka and survived.”
    He’d sent my mother postcards from across Europe for more than a year; suddenly the postcards stopped coming.
    â€œWhat happened?” I asked. “What then?”
    She shrugged. “Nothing. I married your father.”
    In bed that night, Lucy and I couldn’t stop talking about it.
    â€œOh my God. It’s so romantic. To name his daughter after your mother. He must have really loved her.”
    â€œI guess. I guess he did.”
    We recounted the story again and again. Drama, it was. Romance. The Sound of Music, starring my mother. In our minds Rolf grew as handsome and dashing as Christopher Plummer; my father became the balding understudy, with too-short corduroys and mismatched socks.
    Lucy had seen Rolf only in passing; she couldn’t remember what he looked like. “But I’m sure he’s gorgeous. I bet you he’ll be at Summer Showcase. Everybody goes. My God—we’re really going to meet him.”
    As the showcase approached, Jolée told us that we could each perform a five-minute dance onstage. Lucy and I knewexactly what we’d do: we were going to dance the saga of my mother’s first love. We choreographed it expertly. For the war we donned black leotards and galumphed across the stage; then we changed to purple and swept toward each other with elegance and grace; then we crumpled apart. We ended together in a passionate embrace.
    As we rehearsed for Saturday, we decided that watching the dance would reunite my mother with her true love. She and Rolf would see the performance and recognize that their love had never ended; my mother would marry Rolf and we’d move to Maplewood; Fanny would marry Rolf’s long-lost cousin, who’d suddenly appear, and Lucy and I would be related for real. We didn’t even think of Lucy’s father, my father, or my sister; in Maplewood the rest of the world seemed to disappear. It felt possible that everyone could be happy.
    On the morning of the performance I woke up feeling sick, with a sharp, shooting pain around my stomach. I wasn’t sure if the cause was anxiety or something concrete, but by the afternoon, at rehearsal, it hadn’t gone away.
    â€œI don’t feel so well,” I told Lucy.
    â€œIt’s probably just nerves,” she said. “You’re scared of the responsibility. The pressure. It isn’t easy, reuniting old loves.”
    I hugged my abdomen. “I don’t know. Maybe—it could be my friend. ”
    â€œOh,” Lucy said knowingly: my period. “Is she supposed to be visiting now?”
    â€œShe’s early, I think.”
    â€œShe really makes you sick?”
    â€œYeah. Kind of.” I’d rarely told anyone, aside from my mother, how sick my period made me. For most eighth graders, cramps were the imaginary, convenient excuse for getting out of typing, math, or gym, but I was almost doubled over