“It’s eight thirty. I’m having my tea and cake and watchingMy Lottery Dream Home.” She pointed to the new sixty-five-inch set I’d bought her and my mother last year. “Look at that one. Five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a pool.”
“Taking notes?” I settled carefully onto the sofa next to her. My grandmother had been buying lottery tickets for as long as I could remember, her largest winning reaching one hundred dollars, yet she faithfully trekked down to the corner store, rain, snow, or wind, to buy her weekly quick-pick tickets as well as whatever scratch-offs hit her eye.
“I have a feeling. This week will be a lucky one.” Her wispy curls floated around her head like a smoky gray halo.
I’d heard that refrain since I was a child. “I hope so, Grandma.”
She patted my cheek. “If I win, I’ll give you half. You deserve the best. Don’t think I don’t know what you gave up to stay here with us.”
My throat and chest tightened. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m here because I got a great insider price and all the free food I can mooch off you and Mom.”
She cast me a disbelieving look over her wire-rimmed glasses, and I could imagine her students squirming in their seats. My grandmother had been a fourth-grade public-school teacher in the sixties and seventies. Tough, but always fair and kind, she still got Christmas and Chanukah cards from many former students, some with grandchildren of their own. When the temple’s annual food-and-clothing drive had been in danger of closing down, she’d taken over and used it as an opportunity to teach me to give back to those less fortunate, even though we had little ourselves growing up.
She returned to watching luxurious homes on the television, but I waited. I knew my grandmother and she wasn’t finished with me yet.
“Who were you talking to outside?” My mother picked up her needlepoint and began to stitch.
“Who? What do you mean, who?” Every year I thought of moving. Maybe it was time to start looking again. “And how do you know I was talking to someone? Who told you?”
Grandma’s birdlike gaze swept over me. “Who, who, who. You sound like an owl. And Gloria Goldberg told me she saw you talking to a very good-looking man. If you don’t want to tell us about your date, you don’t have to.” The commercial over, she turned her attention back to the television. “After all, we’re only your family.”
Damn. Last time I help Gloria with her shopping cart.She must’ve run upstairs and called my grandmother before she had time to take off her coat.
“Grandma, you are not pulling the guilt card on me.” I folded my arms and pretend-glared at her.
Her lips twitched. “It always worked before. Why give up a sure thing?”
Releasing a belly laugh, I bent and kissed her soft, wrinkled cheek. “Yes, it has.”
We watched another minute of the show.
“So? Who was he?”
The woman was relentless. “You don’t give up, do you?”
“No, and it’s never hurt me in all these years.”
It had always been like this between us. Grandma Nettie and I had a special relationship. Maybe it was because I stayed with her after school when I was young and my parents both worked, my mother as a cleaning woman at Lenox Hill Hospital and my father as an EMS worker. He was killed in a crash sixteen years ago while rushing to answer a call. A year after that, my grandmother had her heart attack, and since then I counted every day with her as a gift.
My mother sat quietly in her chair, waiting expectantly for my answer, but she wouldn’t push. Years and tragedy had grayed her physically as well as in spirit. I didn’t think she ever recovered from my father’s death.
“Remember Ezra Green?”
“That rich boy you went to school with? He moved to California, and you lost touch. That’s what I remember.”
I winced but nodded. Ezra hated being known as the “rich kid,” but when your parents owned one of the biggest talent agencies in the world and knew all the movie and television stars, it was kind of hard to pretend otherwise.
“Yeah. He’s moved back to the city.”
“I remember he was a good-looking boy, so blond and with those big eyes. You made a cute couple.”
I’d had crushes on guys since I was thirteen, but when Ezra sat next to me in history in tenth grade, I fell under the spell of his gorgeous smile and glowing eyes. Every night I’d sleep and dream of him, and crazily enough, he liked me too. We had tried to be discreet with Grandma around, but maybe we weren’t as quiet as we thought. I paused, the memories of Ezra’s kisses and his mouth on me as vivid in that moment as if it were yesterday.
“We weren’t, I mean, um, we didn’t…”
Growing up, I’d never hidden my sexuality, but it wasn’t something I talked about either. And after asking several times who I planned to take to prom, and Ezra and I deciding to go stag with each other, my parents didn’t seem surprised by my coming out six months later. My mother cried and said,“It’s not because of what you think. I love you, and I’m just so scared you have to grow up in a world that doesn’t accept you.”
But how could I explain what Ezra and I were to each other when I didn’t even know myself? At seventeen I thought I did, but those golden days were long gone.
