Always and Forever Read Free Page A

again. Keep it safe for me. I will come back to you.” Sophie pulled herself back into the present. She had never been able to go back to Alex. Their time had never come.
    Downstairs Kathy walked into the cluttered candy store. Assailed by the familiar aromas of chocolate, soda flavorings, and newsprint, she felt an unexpected emotional wrench. She wouldn’t see Mom and Dad and Aunt Sophie for almost half a year.
    “Bubbeleb —” Her mother emerged from behind the counter with arms outstretched, her eyes moist.
    “Mom, just think I’m going to the Catskills to work for the summer,” Kathy coaxed. The year between Erasmus and Barnard she had been a waitress at Grossinger’s for the summer. Mom and Dad hadn’t minded that, though their phone bill for that eight weeks was frightfully high. Still, in an emergency they could drive up in two hours.
    “You’re going to a foreign country,” her mother reminded dramatically. “Germany yet.”
    “I’ll make you an egg cream for the road.” Her father strived for nonchalance. “You, too, Marge.”
    “A little one,” Kathy stipulated and Marge nodded.
    “You still have your job at Macy’s?” Mrs. Ross asked Marge with sudden concern.
    “Oh, sure.” Marge smiled. She knew Kathy’s mother kept predicting women would be losing their jobs now that the soldiers were all coming home from overseas. “I called in sick. Even a trainee can be sick,” she drawled. At first enthusiastic about the job that could lead up to being a buyer, Marge was talking privately about quitting to look for something on Seventh Avenue, at the wholesale level.
    “Don’t be sick too often,” Mrs. Ross exhorted.
    “My wife still lives in the Depression,” her husband chuckled. “So Marge calls in sick. Girls aren’t standing in line waiting to grab her job. These are good times.”
    “Your ship doesn’t sail till midnight,” Mrs. Ross turned to Kathy accusingly. “So why do you have to leave early in the afternoon?”
    “We’re having a meeting up near the campus,” Kathy fabricated. Mom would feel better if she had to go into the city early. In truth, she wanted to roam about Times Square for a nostalgic while with Marge. Then they were going to splurge on an early dinner at Lindy’s. It would be her big farewell to the city.
    “We should get moving,” Marge said and drained the last of her egg cream in noisy appreciation. “It gets harder and harder to find a place to park in the city.”
    “Drive carefully,” Mr. Ross told Marge when Kathy had exchanged warm embraces with her mother and then himself. Kathy suspected he didn’t trust any woman driver. “Crazy drivers on the road these days,” he’d always say.
    “Kathy, you write home regularly,” her mother ordered and Kathy steeled herself to smile in the face of a possible emotional outpouring.
    “I’ll write twice a week,” she promised. “And I’ll be fine.”
    “I won’t have a moment of real peace until you come home,” her mother declared. “Not a night that I won’t lie awake worrying about you.”
    “The war’s over,” Mr. Ross reminded his wife. “Kathy’ll be safe.”
    “I’m glad Aunt Sophie made me learn German through the years,” said Kathy. “At least, I’ll be able to communicate with the people.” But she was somber as she remembered that a long-time neighbor had given her the names of family members who had been caught in Hamburg during the Nazi rule in hopes she might look them up. But it was unlikely that she could track them down.
    Seated on the front seat of the 1937 Chevy beside Marge, her luggage stashed in the trunk, Kathy considered what lay ahead. It would not be a joyous adventure. She and her group would see what had shocked the world when Allied soldiers had liberated the concentration camps. She suspected how they would react to the kind of atrocities that were difficult to conceive but had been documented by photographs and news stories flashed around the