The Ten Best Days of My Life Read Free Page B

they’ll teach me how to do that later. I must check in on my parents.
    uncle Morris is my grandmother’s brother. He was her best friend and never got married because he felt he had to take care of my grandmother and her three sisters after my great-grandparents died.
    â€œDid you know that I thought about you all the time?” I asked him, hugging him, smelling his usual cigar smoke and Life Savers Pep-O-Mint candies.
    â€œOf course I did,” he said, taking me in his arms. “I even shaved for you. Remember how you wouldn’t hug me when you were a little girl because my beard would scrape you?”
    I did. I always remembered how his beard scratched my face. uncle Morris shaved his scratchy beard for me!
    â€œWhenever I ate a Life Saver, I thought of you,” I cried to him.
    I was literally bonkers with happiness at this point, but who cared? Everyone else around me was seeing their families for the first time and was bonkers too. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Braunstein with her parents. She kept hugging them, then screaming, then crying, then hugging them again like she was five years old and just found them after being lost in an amusement park.
    My grandfather nuzzled his arm around me as we walked out of Building Blissful, and my grandmother pulled my sweater back so it wasn’t draping over my shoulder. I love that my grandmother did that. I love that I got to see her again and she could fix my sweater the way she wanted it to be and clean the hot fudge sundae smudge on my face with her saliva (okay, maybe I had a bite of Mrs. Braunstein’s sundae). It’s always the little things we take for granted, isn’t it?
    The strange thing about this whole “spirit and not a being” thing is that people still feel like people. We’re not ghosts. You can’t put your arm through someone like they do in the movies. My grandfather felt warm and alive. As I buried my head in his lapel, he smelled exactly the way I remembered him: Old Spice, the pomade from his hair. My grandmother’s saliva felt like saliva. How are we all so real if we’re dead? Why doesn’t anyone on earth know about this? (Yet they know about the pearly gates and angels. Who gave that away?) This is what was going through my head as we piled into my grandmother’s old lemon-colored Cadillac Coupe deVille with the dirty plastic flower hanging off the antenna. “It’s so I can find it in a parking lot,” she had told me when I was little.
    â€œWhy do you still have this?” I asked, jumping into the backseat with uncle Morris.
    â€œIt still has a few good miles in it,” she said, revving up the gas. “You know how I always loved this car.”
    She really did. I was just surprised that in all these years she never got a new one.
    â€œI love this car,” she said again, backing out of Building Blissful’s parking lot. “Remember, honey, it’s heaven. You get what you want.”
    I wondered if there were Porsche dealerships up here.
    â€œWhat’s the deal with money up here?” I asked them.
    â€œDon’t have it,” uncle Morris told me. “Everything just appears. We worked hard enough on earth. In heaven you get everything your soul desires.”
    Freaky, yet true, because when we pulled up to a house, after my grandparents fought over the directions (some things never change), it was a split-colonial farmhouse with a small creek in front. I knew that house very well. It took me a second, but then I remembered.
    â€œWait, that’s Len Jacobs’s house,” I said out loud.
    Len Jacobs was a kid I grew up with outside Philadelphia. I wasn’t crazy about Len. We weren’t friends; he was in a totally different group in high school. Len was that guy in the eighties who got really into the punk scene and shaved his head into a Mohawk. Len always wore an army jacket with big clunky leather boots with chains dangling