The Matchmaker's Gift(27)

By the time she was finished, her eyes were burning, her lips were swollen, and her nose was red. But her fingers were no longer curled into fists and her sneakers no longer felt like lead. Her grandmother sensed the shift in her bearing. “When you have a good cry, the heart gets lighter, no?”

Abby nodded, and her stomach growled. “You’re hungry,” Grandma Sara said. “Let’s go for a walk and get you something to eat.”

Together, they walked east on Sixty-Seventh Street into the warm spring afternoon. Grandma Sara hummed softly under her breath, one of the wordless tunes Abby recognized so well. Just outside the entrance to Central Park, they stopped at a group of street cart vendors. “Ice cream?” Grandma Sara asked, but Abby frowned and shook her head. Ever since the sundaes at Rumpelmayer’s, Abby had lost her taste for the stuff.

Instead of ice cream, her grandmother bought them pretzels—giant, soft ones, sprinkled with salt. Grandma Sara squeezed some mustard onto hers, while Abby preferred to eat hers bare. They found a bench inside the park and sat side by side, with their shoulders touching.

“Grandma,” Abby said, “why is my dad such a jerk?”

“There are worse fathers, sweetheart. Believe me. Some of what I’ve seen … well, I’ll tell you one day when you’re older. For now, let’s just say, he does what he can. It’s not what you want, but it’s all he can do.”

Abby kicked the toe of her sneaker in the dirt. “I know. But why did he marry my mom in the first place? If he didn’t love her, why did he do it?”

Her grandmother didn’t answer right away. She swallowed the last bit of her pretzel and wiped the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “He thought he loved her,” Grandma Sara said. “The same way she thought she loved him. What can I tell you? They weren’t a good match.”

“Did you know that when the two of them got married?”

Her grandmother wrinkled up her nose. “What did I know?” Abby waited for her grandmother to answer, sensing, somehow, that she should not interrupt. On the path in front of them, a young man walked his dog. A couple pushed a baby carriage; a group of teenagers raced past. A lonesome pigeon pecked the dirt, hoping to find a few crumbs for his lunch. Meanwhile, Abby sat in silence, wondering what her grandmother would say next.

“I’ve told you before that I used to make matches,” she began. “Even at your age, I couldn’t stop myself. I would see something in two people when they were together, and then … well. I could never explain it, not to my father, not to my sister. They understood what I could do, but never how I could do it. I was never able to find the right words.”

“Did you see something in my mother and my father?”

Abby’s grandmother shook her head. “When I looked at my daughter, it was like static on a television set. There was no picture, nothing clear, nothing to help me understand.”

“What about when Uncle Eddie married Aunt Judy?”

“It was the same with my son. There was nothing I could see. I told myself it was for the best—I would have driven myself crazy. A mother should help her children, but she shouldn’t tell them who to love.”

“That makes sense,” Abby agreed. “I’ve never even had a boyfriend, and I hate it when my mom asks me about it. Love is way more complicated now than when you were young.”

Grandma Sara’s laugh was so loud and unexpected that it startled the pigeon pecking nearby. She reached for her granddaughter’s hand and squeezed. “Love hasn’t changed, mameleh. It was just as complicated back then. If it had been so easy, no one would have needed me.”

Abby was skeptical, but she did not argue. A question popped into her head. “What about my dad and Tanja?” she asked. “Do you think they’re a match? Will their marriage last?”

Grandma Sara raised her eyebrows. She tried to stop herself from reacting, but this time her guffaw was contagious. Soon, both of them were doubled over on the bench, rolling back and forth with raucous laughter. It took a few minutes for the fit to subside, at which point Abby’s grandmother finally answered the question.

“No, my darling. Not a chance.”



* * *



Dinner with Will was relaxed and easy—comfortable in a way Abby wasn’t expecting. This time, he kissed her in the cab; his lips were warm and surprisingly soft, and he tasted like the wine they had shared. When he dropped her off, there was a moment when she could have invited him up to her apartment. But he didn’t ask and Abby didn’t offer. She didn’t want to complicate things—not yet.

He called the next day, just as he’d promised, and invited her to come to his office Monday night. “There’s a great view of the East River from our conference room. It’s on the forty-first floor. A few of us are going to hang out and watch the fireworks.”

“You mean, all the other losers who work on national holidays?”

“Exactly. It’s your ideal crowd. Want to come?”

“How can I refuse an offer like that?”

Will was waiting for her outside his office building when the taxi dropped her off. She hadn’t known whether she was supposed to bring anything, so at the last minute she’d grabbed a bottle of wine and a plastic container filled with dried apricots and pistachios. It wasn’t until she was already in the cab that she realized she’d brought the same snack she used to bring for her visits to the cemetery with her grandmother. Goddamn it, Abby, she thought to herself.