Read As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel for Free Online Page B

completely alone, just the two of them, in the Syrkin living room, quietly conversing. Once they’d gone out to see a picture show.
    In three days, Vivie told Ada one evening, it would be Mort’s birthday. He would be twenty-four. She’d hoped to bake him a cake, to surprise him with it. They were to have a little party there at the store, Vivie, Mort, and the old man, Mr. Leibritsky.
    “I had it all planned,” Vivie complained. She pulled her blankets over her face, despairing, and then pushed them down again, waist high. She was still flushed with fever and sweating. Ada urged her to drink more water, which she’d iced to help battle the fever.
    Vivie sipped while Ada held the glass. Sated for the moment, Vivie dropped her head back onto her pillows. “It was going to be a yellow cake with chocolate frosting,” she said, her voice almost a whimper.
    Ada nodded. Everyone loved a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. The choice was sensible enough, but maybe a little predictable, a little bland.
    “Oh, Lord, Ada. Do you think this will ever end?” Vivie asked. Upon seeing her sister swipe her brow, Ada offered Vivie a hanky to mop up the moisture. Ada wasn’t sure if Vivie was speaking of her fever or of the courtship with Mort. “I think I need to sleep,” Vivie added, her voice falling. In the next minute she dropped off.
    Ada brought Mort the cake. She baked it, on Vivie’s behalf, Risel encouraging Ada when she thought to make a chocolate cake with butter cream frosting rather than Vivie’s yellow cake. “Yes, yes. Bring him a good cake, at least,” Risel said. And good, Ada knew, was Risel’s best word for marvelous.
    A good cake—the batter light, the frosting thick—is exactly what my mother brought him, on a platter, covered with wax paper. She donned her boots, coat, gloves, and scarf, and as she carried the cake to Leibritsky’s on Main Street, a mile-long walk, she trod carefully to avoid slipping on patches of winter ice.
    “It’s for you,” she announced upon her arrival at the store, the tinkling bells as she walked through the doorway startling her. Mort stood before her, thin and not particularly tall, a dimple in his chin, waves of hair crossing his forehead, a warm smile marking his face. In his own way he was handsome, she thought, more so in the store than on those evenings in their home when she caught glimpses of him as she passed by the living room where he and Vivie sat. There he was stiff, in both posture and facial expression, but here he was so much more himself: smiling, self-assured, welcoming. She said, “Vivie couldn’t deliver it herself; she’s still so sick. But I know she wanted you to have this.”
    “How is she?” he asked, taking the cake from Ada then pointing to a chair.
    “Coming along.”
    Mort insisted that Ada sit. “This is an awful lot of trouble,” he told her. He eyed the cake as he brought her a cup of coffee.
    “It really is, ” she answered.
    When he widened his eyes in response, she laughed, a quick hoot.
    She spun around to take in the store before seating herself in one of the leather armchairs that were more or less at the store’s center. She’d been there before, many times over the years, but never by herself. The place looked different, somehow, from the vantage point of her first journey there alone. More interesting. The green-rimmed dishes to her left were rather pretty, she thought. On a shelf across from them the men’s ties were as colorful as a rainbow. Just as always, there seemed to be no plan to the inventory at Leibritsky’s, but for the first time the disarray was less confusing than appealing.
    “Can I interest you in anything?” Mort asked. A moment ago she’d heard him ask the same thing of a customer, an older man, who was now talking to Mort’s father.
    “Cake?” she answered, smiling.
    Soon they all had some: Ada, Mort, old man Leibritsky, and the customer. She amused them with talk of another cake she almost