Free Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner

died.”
    The bedsprings creaked as Jo rolled over again. “Do you think people are actually going to ask where it happened?”
    “They might.” Bethie had already given some thought to the question of how her classmates would react if they learned that her father had died on the toilet. It was shallow, she knew, but Bethie cared about people’s opinions in a way that Jo didn’t. Maybe it was fine for Jo to just have Lynnette and her friends on the basketball team, and to wear her sloppy jeans and their father’s old button-down shirts, not paying attention to what anyone thought of her, but Bethie was different. Bethie did care. And if people found out that Ken Kaufman had died on the toilet, they would laugh. “How about we just say the floor? It’s not technically wrong. Because he was on the floor.”
    “He was on the floor, after the ambulance people pulled him off the toilet.”
    Bethie sighed, wondering where Jo’s unwavering commitment to the truth had come from, and why she herself hadn’t gotten it. “Well, I’m telling people that we found him on the floor.”
    “Say whatever you want,” Jo said. “I don’t care.” Her voice wobbled.
    After a moment, Bethie asked, “Do you think we’ll be all right? With . . . with money and stuff?” Bethie only had a general awareness about financial matters. Certainly, there were kids whose families had more money than hers did—Cheryl Goldfarb came to mind—but Bethie and her family had enough. They went to Lake Erie for a week every summer; they replaced their Ford sedan whenever the new model came out. With their father dead, without his income, would they still be all right?
    The pause stretched out for so long that Bethie wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand it. “I guess,” Jo finally. “I guess we’ll have to be.”
    *  *  *
    At the shiva, their father’s mother, Grandma Elkie, and his brother, their uncle Mel, were the first to arrive. Uncle Mel and his wife, Aunt Shirley, their daughters, Audrey and Joanne, and son,Donnie, ages ten, eight, and six, paused at the front door, passing a deli platter the size of a wagon wheel from one to another as each of them washed their hands. Inside, Aunt Shirley hugged their mother and asked her, “What can I do?” while Uncle Mel helped his mother get settled in the living room. Elkie was tiny, frail, almost bald, mostly toothless. That day, she wore a loose, dark-blue dress and a small round hat with a veil covering her sparse white hair. Like Bubbe, she spoke only Yiddish. That afternoon, she didn’t speak at all, she just sat there and cried, while the cousins stared at Jo and Bethie, like the two of them were animals in a zoo.
    Uncle Mel was eight years younger than their father had been. Ken’s parents had left their shtetl in Poland, running from the pogroms in 1908. They’d taken a ship to New York City, then made their way to Detroit because a cousin’s friend had promised Chaim Kaufman a job. The part that Bethie could never understand was that they’d left their son behind. Ken, whose name was Kalman then, had stayed with Elkie’s parents, whose shtetl was, Bethie supposed, a little safer than the one they’d left, while his father found work as a day laborer moving furniture in Detroit and, eventually, saved up enough money to move out of their cousin’s apartment and into one of their own.
    Seven years elapsed before they were able to bring Ken to the United States. By the time he arrived, a new baby had been born. Melvin had an American name, and he spoke perfect English, without the greenhorn accent that plagued his brother. Bethie understood that her father had grown up loving his brother and resenting him, too. His parents had pinned all of their hopes on Mel, and Ken had been more like a parent than a sibling, dropping out of school at sixteen to help support the family. Even though he’d been smart enough to go to college, only Melvin had gotten the chance. Bethie’s