Hope and Other Punch Lines(70)

“Yup,” Charlotte says. “I know it sounds inappropriate, but I swear, it was the perfect thing. I was terrified and his silly joke brought me back to myself. He made me feel better. He reminded me that I was alive.”

That word fate, which reared its head when I saw Abbi at Knight’s Day Camp all those weeks ago, pops into my brain again, and this time it doesn’t even make me feel a little embarrassed or uncomfortable.

For the first time in my entire life, I feel a direct connection between me and my father. When I was younger, I thought of him as a question mark—an entirely unknowable entity, or worse, a void. Recently, he’s morphed into a comic-book superhero—spandexed and fearless—which has felt equally untouchable. But now I realize that it’s unfair to distill him down to a single decision—turning around—as enormous a legacy as that may seem.

“Wow,” Abbi says.

“I know,” I say.

“Your dad told the first nine-eleven joke ever. Ever,” she says.

“And it killed,” I say, with the confidence of knowing that my dad, whoever he might have been, would have loved that terrible pun.

“Groan,” Abbi says, but she’s smiling.

I think about my father’s last words. Only slightly more hilarious than heartbreaking, and grounded wholly in the truth.

The perfect punchline.

I could laugh or I could cry.

I choose to laugh.





Later, at home, my grandmother and Paula are eating pizza in the breakfast nook, and my mom perches on the counter. My dad sits at the stool around the kitchen island.

“Are you guys staging an intervention or something?” I ask, and grab a slice from an open box. “What’s going on?”

“Your ChapStick is a little smeared,” my grandma says, and smirks.

“The Noah problem wasn’t about you after all, I hear,” Paula says.

“What Noah problem?” my mom asks. “Why am I the last to hear about everything? How are you feeling, Abbi? Any coughing?”

“Nothing bad,” I say, which is the truth. My incision has started to heal. I can imagine my lungs again being just another part of my body one day, like my belly button or my knees. Something I don’t think about much, beyond my asthma. “There was no Noah problem. There was, at one point, a Noah misunderstanding. All’s good.”

“All’s good, huh?” my dad asks, and looks over at my mom and beams with pride. They talk out loud without saying a word.

My dad: See, you were worried for no reason. She’s developmentally right on target.

My mom: We should send Dr. Schwartz champagne!

“Listen, I know your dad spoke to you a little about…us…him and me, I mean, and I wanted to let you know that sometimes he’ll be staying over here,” my mom says, laying out the words slowly and carefully, like they are somehow explosive if not handled correctly. “I know it’s a little confusing.”

“I’m almost seventeen, not five. It’s not confusing at all.” I take a second slice of pizza. I’m suddenly ravenous. I blame the kissing. “So Dad’s moving back home?”

“We’re taking it slowly,” my mom says. “We’re not rushing into anything.”

“You do realize you already have a child together, right? No one would call you guys getting back together rushing.”

“Your mom would call it rushing,” my dad says.

“Your mom’s a cautious lady. I respect that,” Paula says.

“Your mom’s dumb,” my grandmother says, and we all look at her, unsure who is talking right now. If it’s the dementia, the version of my grandmother who I recently caught dancing with my dead grandfather in the living room, or just my grandma, who in the best of times doesn’t mince words. “What? Why are you all looking at me like that? I’m wearing pants, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are, and we appreciate it,” I say.

“You don’t mess around with love. When you got it, you hold on to it. Simple,” my grandmother says.

“Nothing is ever that simple,” my mom says, but she looks thoughtful, like she’s weighing my grandma’s words. She takes a sip of wine, puts the glass back on the counter. My father watches her and for once stays quiet.

He’ll wait.

“Maybe it is,” I say.

“Not for nothing, but you’ve been in love for, what? Five seconds?” Paula’s tone is teasing, not mean.

“I’m not in love,” I say, and the entire room erupts with laughter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they broke out into “Noah and Abbi sitting in a tree.”

“What? I’m not!”

“Then you’re dumb too,” my grandmother says.





The sixteenth anniversary of 9/11 and my birthday fall on a Monday, the most descriptive day of the week.

A beginning.

The ceremony starts at 8:45 a.m., as it does every year, to mark the time when the first plane hit the first tower, to recognize when the world broke into a before and an after. I got up early this morning and blew out my hair and painted my nails a mature pale pink. I’m wearing a recently dry-cleaned dress that my mom picked out and ballet flats and I look both like me and not like me at all. At the last minute, I put on my fox earrings to add something familiar.