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me?”
    “Loud and clear. Kids, get your sneakers!” Artie yelled. “We’re getting TCBY. Mom needs a Mississippi Mud Thriller Chiller!”
    What to call the in-laws? That is the question newlyweds ponder, though not in Artie’s case. After his third date with Mindy, he told Helene that he was going to marry her daughter and started calling her Mom. She was so thrilled that a doctor’s son was falling in love with Mindy, she started calling him sonny boy and made him dinner every night.
    Rhoda, on the other hand, made it clear to Mindy that she had no interest in being adopted. “My two wonderful sons are my children. I’ll answer to anything but mother.”
    To his credit, Stan Sherman offered to let Mindy call him Dear Neighbor, Drop Dead
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    Dad, though she never found out if this unusually gracious gesture was because he’d always wanted a daughter or that he genu-inely liked her.
    But how quickly that old familial feeling could dissipate.
    When Mindy mentioned she would like to start working reception part-time in his office, “Dad” suddenly changed his tune.
    There would be terms, he told her. She had better not expect to earn a dime more than the others, and if she tried pulling rank, she’d be out the door. “I don’t need the girls kvetching that you took an extra ten minutes for lunch.”
    Mindy assured him she understood, never expecting that it would be Stan who took advantage. He made her come in on her days off, yelled at her for mistakes made by others, and often sent her on personal errands he couldn’t be bothered with.
    T-minus two days before the cruise, he realized he’d forgotten to pick up his new tux and told Mindy to get it for him on her lunch hour. “But be back by one. We have a full afternoon.”
    “I don’t believe him.” Mindy called Artie on the way to her car. “Why should I have to schlep all the way to Garden City? I have my own errands to run!”
    “Just do what he asks, okay?” he pleaded. “He’s treating us for a whole week.”
    “I don’t care. I’m so sick of this. I’m going back in and telling him what I think.”
    Artie had no such fear. He had heard his wife terrorize customer service reps in India, but confront Stan and his hard-boiled temper? Just the thought would make her break out in hives. And yet, what Artie didn’t realize was that something inside his wife was churning.
    She was tired and stressed as usual, but she’d also just returned from visiting her eighty-seven-year-old grandmother at the nursing home. A Holocaust survivor, and the only feisty 38
    Saralee Rosenberg
    member of Mindy’s lineage, of late, Jenny Baumann was an equal opportunity destroyer who woke up combative and didn’t close her eyes until someone had gotten a piece of her mind. “The only reason she’s still alive is because God is afraid to meet her,”
    Mindy would joke.
    Yet every time she left there, she’d say to herself, Mindy, you need to be more like her. Open your mouth! Stand up for your rights! Demand that the peas not be undercooked!
    Brimming with an eerie determination, Mindy returned to the office on a head of steam, shut Stan’s door, and zoned in on his temples. If it was a bad day and he was ready to blow, his lobes would be purple and pulsing like Shakira in concert. Thankfully they were resting.
    “I was thinking, Dad, “she cleared her throat, “since the tux place is right by Roosevelt Field, maybe afterward I would run over there and get some shopping done.”
    “Forget it. The girls would never let me hear the end of it.”
    “Oh. Really? Well okay then . . . I guess you’ll have to get the tux yourself.”
    “Can’t.” Cue left lobe. “You know I’m booked solid the whole day.”
    “ Hmm. Tough call.” She stood with hands on her hips like she’d seen Rhoda do. “Lose an afternoon’s billings or give Mindy a few hours off?”
    “Have you lost your mind?” he looked up.
    “Very possibly . . . Aren’t you glad you’re the