Free Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner Page B

here for you, people would just offer to do something specific. I will wash the dishes or I will fold the laundry or I will take your Introduction to Biology final so that you don’t have to study. But, instead of making her friends feel uncomfortable, she just said, “I saw the prettiest formal in the window at Kern’s,” and the girls seemed relieved to change the subject.
    As the day went on, Bethie pushed the memory of what Uncle Mel had done out of her head, telling herself that it had been a mistake, or that maybe she’d imagined it. Uncle Mel disappeared for a while, to take his mother, wife, and children home, but thenhe came back in the late afternoon and hovered by the schnapps until the rabbi arrived to lead the minyan, the group of ten men who would recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
    Her mother stood in the doorway to the living room, clutching a handkerchief, as the men stood, chanting the Hebrew words. Jo stood behind her, somber and still. “Dear, can you get me a sweater?” Sarah asked Bethie, once the service was over. Bethie went into her parents’ bedroom—just her mother’s bedroom now, she thought. She’d just closed the dresser drawer when the bedroom door opened, and there was her uncle, red-faced and unsteady on his feet.
    “Bethie.” His voice was thick. He’d taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie.
    “Hi, Uncle Mel.” She tried to edge past him, but he grabbed her elbow and held her tight.
    “Do you know Robert Frost? ‘The Road Not Taken’?”
    Bethie nodded. They’d read the poem in English class the year before, and she thought it was called “The Road Less Traveled,” but this didn’t seem the time to point it out.
    “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,” her uncle said, and started to cry. He wept and clutched her, enveloping her in his arms and the fetid mist of his breath. She thought that he was saying My poor brother , but it was hard for her to understand, because Uncle Mel had buried his wet, scratchy face against her neck and had pressed his whole body against hers. This time, one of his hands brushed against the side of her breast.
    Without thinking, Bethie shoved him away, so hard that his back banged into the wall, dislodging a framed photograph of her parents that had been taken on their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. They looked impossibly young, standing on the deck of the Maid of the Mist , her father with his arms around her mother’s shoulders, and Sarah, in a neat navy-blue suit with a pleated skirt, smiling a dreamy smile.
    Breathing hard, speechless with shock at his actions and herown, Bethie stared at her uncle as he bent over clumsily, picking the picture up off the floor. It took him two tries to hook the wire over the nail, and when he let go the picture was crooked. Without a word of apology, he turned and walked out into the hall. Bethie watched him go, breathing hard, wishing she’d grabbed the hand he’d groped her with and slammed it through the nail. She locked the door, then sat down on her parents’ bed—her mother’s bed, now—and made herself take deep, slow breaths until she stopped shaking. In the bathroom, she ran cold water over her wrists, put a pleasant expression on her face, collected the sweater her mother had asked for, and went to help clear away the uneaten food and pile up the prayer books that they’d use again the next night.
    *  *  *
    When the house was finally empty, the Kaufman women gathered again around the kitchen table. “So much food,” Sarah said. She sounded dazed. Before the minyan, Bethie had overheard Larry Fein, a cousin in his first year of medical school, telling Aunt Shirley that an artery that led to her father’s heart had gotten clogged. “The widowmaker, they call that one,” he’d said, looking puffed up and proud of himself, before noticing Bethie watching him and quickly looking away.
    Jo