Keeping Secrets

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Book: Read Keeping Secrets for Free Online
Authors: Sarah Shankman
Tags: Fiction
right door. Her husband, Herb, said she looked through their other two children as if they were ghosts, as if they too had been snatched away by rheumatic fever.
    His brothers had families, problems, of their own.
    “Ruth,” he cried into the phone, “Helen’s gone.”
    The next day his redhaired baby sister was at his side, Ruth who had slapped the faces of boys who teased him about his stutter, the one who could always make him laugh, dancing a jig, striking a pose.
    “Oh, Jake.” She stroked the top of his balding head. “Poor Jake, I’ll take her home to raise with my little Ed.”
    “No!” The word had burst out. But then he wrapped Emma in the blanket embroidered with pink and blue cat faces that Helen had stitched with her slender hands. He had to move back to New York and let Ruth keep Emma. This wasn’t breaking his promise to Helen. This wasn’t letting Emma go.
    He took the train Saturdays at noon after his job at a Manhattan cleaner’s. It was only an hour to Connecticut, where Ruth lived while her husband George built destroyers in New London.
    Ruth met him at the door with Emma, handing the bundled baby to him before she even kissed him hello. Then they sat in her front room, their feet resting on an Oriental carpet, and sipped hot tea through lumps of sugar held in their mouths as Riva had taught them. Ruth served a pot roast, purchased with the coupons Jake had saved, and her famous pilaff with noodles, tomatoes and green beans.
    “She’s a precious baby, Jake. Helen would have been so proud. I just wish I’d known her.”
    Jake’s eyes filled with tears and he nodded.
    No one had known Helen except him.
    “Why didn’t you ever bring her around, Jake? Just that once, to Rhoda’s house, that one afternoon.”
    Jake stared into his hands. He couldn’t explain to Ruth that he’d always felt himself a failure, that his father favored the other brothers, the ones who never stopped talking, talking, talking with glib tongues that made deals, made money, made friends, while he sat silent on the sofa and watched his life drift by. Finally, when he had found Helen, the things he felt were too complicated to even begin to explain.
    Perhaps he had feared that they would disapprove. And if his father had said a single harsh word, he would have…well, he wouldn’t have been responsible.
    Or was he afraid his brothers would tease him, marrying so quickly and so late, as if to seize romance, under any circumstances, before it got away?
    He only knew that it felt safer just keeping to themselves. Helen hadn’t asked any questions about his family. And he didn’t ask any about hers. They had each other. The past didn’t matter. What they had was enough.
    “I don’t know, Ruth,” he finally answered.
    “Well, that’s okay. We’ll just raise her as a Fine. Nothing wrong with that.” Jake agreed, nothing wrong at all.
    But it wasn’t long after that—Emma was just beginning to creep across Ruth’s red-and-blue Oriental carpet—when a middle-of-the-night desperate call had come the other way, from Ruth’s house to his.
    God, if anything’s happened to my baby I’ll curse your name and die, Jake thought as he squeezed the receiver in his hand.
    “It’s George,” Ruth cried on the other end of the line. “He’s been burned—in an accident in New London. They don’t expect him to live the night.”
    George did live, with Ruth at his side changing his dressings, slipping ice through his parched lips.
    And Jake stood, once again, alone with the infant Emma in his arms.
    Then his old friend and brother-in-law Herb called. “My sister Shirley is living out in Brooklyn, in Flatbush. Her husband is overseas. She’ll take care of Emma.”
    “But I can’t…”
    “Can’t what, Jake?”
    Shirley’s family, Helen. I’m not letting her go.
    * * *
    “There are lots of women in this neighborhood giving you the eye, Jake,” Shirley said. They were walking to the candy store for an egg cream

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