“Starving,” I say.
The front door opens, and Joan, my parents’ neighbor, comes in carrying a bouquet of wild roses with a wet paper towel wrapped around its base.
“Deb, I burnt the hamantaschen and I—” She rounds the corner. She has on silk pants and a linen button-down, and her silver hair hangs in strings around her shoulders. “Oh, hi, honey.” She kisses me on the cheek. Joan always smells like vegetable soup, no matter the time of day or year. “How are you?”
“Keeping the bats at bay,” I tell her.
Joan frowns, and my mother takes the flowers.
“The roses are really going off,” Joan says. “You wouldn’t believe it. I have yellow ones now, too. Lance told me they only bloom in the summer, but you get a sunny day around here and all of a sudden they’re lining the wall.”
The roses she has brought us today are the lightest shade of pink, rimmed with bright neon at their edges. They’re beautiful.
“I’ll have to come get some,” my mother says. “Mine have suffered with the drought this year.”
I think about telling her they looked gorgeous outside: plump and bright and full—but the roses seem to be an unspoken point of contention between my mother and Joan. I leave it.
The doorbell rings. My father calls, “Coming!”
Once every other month, my mother throws a brunch for her friends at Kehillat Israel, the reconstructionist temple she and my father belong to in the Pacific Palisades. We’ve always been reform, but over the years my mother got more and more progressive, and now their temple has things like namaSHVITZ yoga, bead blessings, and curiously uniform feelings about Israel.
My father comes into the kitchen with Marty and Dox, and Irvin and the Other Debra. The Other Debra is not my mother’s favorite person, but my father loves Irvin (as does she, as do I), so she tolerates her.
“Welcome, everyone!” my mother calls. “Onto the patio. Out of the kitchen!”
My mother air-kisses them all and shoos them out. Joan and I stay behind with her.
“Any men?” Joan asks me.
My mother makes a bristling noise but doesn’t turn around from the stove, where she is now preparing a frittata with caramelized onions.
I consider it, then: “Kind of.”
At this she whips around.
“His name is Jake,” I say. “We’ve only been out twice.” What’s the difference? The paper says what the paper says. I might as well give them something juicy to chew on while I’m here.
“What does he do?” my mother asks.
“He’s a studio exec,” I say. “He’s not very tall, I’m sorry, but he seems pretty sweet.”
Joan clasps her hands together. “Oh, to be young!” she says.
Joan’s husband passed away three years ago from pancreatic cancer. My mother sat shiva the whole week with her and cooked for the month following. We loved Hal. He was warm and hearty—a big, burly man who wasn’t shy about throwing his arms around her or anyone who walked through their door. They had two sons together, both of whom live in New York. There was an era in which Joan was hell-bent on getting me together with her eldest, David, but he always had a girlfriend—who five years ago became his wife. Joan still tells me that maybe someday they’ll get divorced.
“What else?” my mother asks. “How did you meet?”
“Kendra set us up.” I look at Joan. “My friend from work.”
“Is he Jewish?”
It’s a good question. His name is Jake Green, but it’s hard to say. “I think so,” I tell her.
A timer goes off, and my mother takes some sizzling potatoes out of the oven. “Joannie, take the fruit out, will you?”
Joan grabs the platter and does as she’s told. I hold a ceramic plate underneath the potato tray as my mother scoops them off.
“How is Hugo?” she asks.
