Strangers Read Free Page A

reddened eyes on a never-specified allergy. “Must be unusual pollens in the air today,” he said twice on the way home from graduation. “Irritating pollens.”
    Anna said, “It’s all come together in you,
bubbeleh.
My best features and your father’s best, and you’re going places, by God, you just wait and see if you aren’t. High school, then college, then maybe law school or medical school, anything you want to do. Anything.”
    The only people who
never
underestimated Ginger were her parents.
    They reached home, turned into the driveway. Jacob stopped short of the garage and said, in surprise, “What are we doing? Our only child graduates from sixth grade, our child who—since she can do absolutely
anything
—will probably marry the King of Siam and ride a giraffe to the moon, our child wears her first cap and gown and we aren’t celebrating? Should we drive into Manhattan, have maybe champagne at the Plaza? Dinner at the Waldorf? No. Something better. Only the best for our giraffe-riding astronaut. We’ll go to the soda fountain at Walgreen’s!”
    “Yeah!” Ginger said.
    At Walgreen’s, they must have been as odd a family as the soda jerk had ever seen: the Jewish father, not much bigger than a jockey, with a Germanic name but a Sephardic complexion; the Swedish mother, blond and gloriously feminine, five inches taller than her husband; and the child, a wraith, an elf, petite though her mother was not, fair though her father was dark, with a beauty altogether different from her mother’s—a more subtle beauty with a fey quality. Even as a child, Ginger knew that strangers, seeing her with her parents, must think she was adopted.
    From her father, Ginger had inherited her slight stature, soft voice, intellect, and gentleness.
    She loved them both so completely and intensely that, as a child, her vocabulary had been insufficient to convey her feelings. Even as an adult, she could not find the words to express what they had meant to her. They were both gone now, to early graves.
    When Anna died in a traffic accident, shortly after Ginger’s twelfth birthday, the common wisdom among Jacob’s relatives was that both Ginger and her father would be adrift without the Swede, whom the Weiss clan had long ago ceased to regard as an interloping gentile and for whom they had developed both respect and love. Everyone knew how close the three had been, but, more important, everyone knew that Anna had been the engine powering the family’s success. It was Anna who had taken the least ambitious of the Weiss brothers—Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the meek, Jacob with his nose always in a detective novel or a science fiction story—and made something of him. He had been an employee in a jewelry store when she married him, but by the time she died he owned two shops of his own.
    After the funeral, the family gathered at Aunt Rachel’s big house in Brooklyn Heights. As soon as she could slip away, Ginger sought solacein the dark solitude of the pantry. Sitting on a stool, with the aroma of many spices heavy in the air of that narrow place, praying to God to bring her mother back, she heard Aunt Francine talking to Rachel in the kitchen. Fran was bemoaning the grim future awaiting Jacob and his little girl in a world without Anna:
    “He won’t be able to keep the business going, you know he won’t, not even once the grief has passed and he goes back to work. The poor
luftmensch.
Anna was his common sense and his motivation and his best adviser, and without her in five years he’ll be lost.”
    They were underestimating Ginger.
    To be fair, Ginger was only twelve, and even though she was already in tenth grade, she was still a child in most people’s eyes. No one could have foreseen that she would fill Anna’s shoes so quickly. She shared her mother’s love of cooking, so in the weeks following the funeral she pored through cookbooks, and, with the amazing diligence and perseverance that were her trademarks, she