Watch You Die Read Free

her?”
    I almost laughed. I hadn’t lived with my mother for twenty-two years. “No, she’s in a home for Alzheimer’s patients. It’s on the Upper West Side.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I imagine your parents miss you on the Vineyard.”
    “My mom does. I never knew my dad.”
    “Any siblings?”
    “No, it was just me and my mom growing up.” He stopped abruptly, which made me curious, but I let it go.
    “Me too, after age nine, anyway.”
    Joe looked at me, awaiting an explanation. When I was nine years old my father Karl committed suicide by jumping out of his office window in midtown Manhattan. He was a wonderful man, a creative director at an advertising agency, successful, loved and well off; but more than that he was a survivor of the Holocaust. A child survivor. My parents in fact had met in the camps. Both were child laborers: he, digging and burying, she, mending and ironing for the commandant’s wife. Clearly, of the two, he had had the worse job. The scars from that time ran so deep and hurt so much, the resonance was so painful – and he suffered. Finally, he stopped the pain and the noise and the memories all at once. When he died, despite aching hearts, my mother, Eva, and I agreed that we understood why he had made this terrible choice. “He couldn’t listen to it anymore,” she told me, making a familiar circling motion around her head with both hands, meaning
the echoes
. In the same conversation she assured me that she would never make such a choice; she would never, ever leave me. My mother was very strong and I didn’t doubt her for an iota of a second. She moved us from New Jersey to Brooklyn – just as I had, widowed, with my only child – and started a new life. For years she worked in the garment industry as a seamstress of couture bridal gowns – I could still see her muscular fingers negotiating a wisp-thin steel needle through bead after tiny bead – while I grew and blossomed into a regular American kid , hard-working and optimistic as only an immigrant’s child can be. Now we were reconvened in the city of mended lives. But none of that was Joe’s business.
    “My father passed away,” I said, and left it at that.
    At Sixth Avenue we entered the park. It was crowded, thanks to the lovely weather. People were perched on the round edge of the fountain, and on the Great Lawn it took a few minutes to find ourselves a spot. Joe took off his denim jacket and spread it on the grass for me to sit on. It was a sweet gesture and completely unnecessary. Even my beloved, considerate husband hadn’t done stuff like that, though I admit it was nice knowing my skirt wouldn’t get grass stains. I tucked my legs beneath me and positioned my lap to hold my sandwich. Hungry, I dug in.
    “So where are you living now?” Joe asked.
    I struggled to answer through a half-full mouth: “Brooklyn.”
    “A realtor stuck me in Washington Heights but I’m thinking of moving.”
    “Don’t you have a lease?”
    “Yeah, but my landlord’s a sweet old lady. She’ll probably let me out of it if I ask her. Where in Brooklyn are you?”
    “Boerum Hill. We’ve got a duplex with a big back yard. It’s really very nice. Good for my kid.” I caught a pickle slice as it tumbled off the wax paper spread beneath my sandwich, and ate it.
    “I’d love to have children some day.” In a burst of sun his smile looked bright white but I could also see, just visible toward the back, a tooth that appeared dark and rotted. That, or it was an empty space. As a reporter I was trained to read stories in such details. In Joe’s mouth I saw that he grew up poor on an island whose economy, I knew from having lived there, was driven by tourism and high-end real estate. Full-time inhabitants without specialized educations and skills tended to scrape by. I already knew he was an only child of a single mother. Now I also knew that they couldn’t afford dental work, at least for the part of the mouth that didn’t