Before She Was Our Mother

Chapter One: The Unveiling

The headstone was smaller than David Levin wanted, and he had told his mother so, twice, in the months after the funeral.

It stood under a white cloth at the end of row nineteen, between a dentist from Wynnefield and a woman named Fay Gutkin who had died in 1987. Gray granite, plain block letters, nothing carved on it but a name, two dates, and the words BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER. David had seen the proof in January. He had pointed out that his father had built six furniture showrooms from nothing, that every Philadelphian over forty could still hum the jingle, that a man like Leonard Levin deserved a stone people would stop and look at.

"People don't stop and look at stones," his mother had said. "They stop and look at people. Then they go home."

Now the whole family stood in a loose half circle on the wet grass of the cemetery off the Roosevelt Boulevard, waiting for Rabbi Feinstein to finish adjusting his reading glasses. It was the third week of May. The sky over the Northeast was the color of a nickel, and the air smelled like cut lawn and car exhaust.

David stood beside his wife, Lisa, who had her arm hooked through his. She wore the navy dress she wore to funerals and bar mitzvahs, and she had put her hand on his back twice in the car, which meant she could tell something was wrong and had decided to blame grief. He let her. Grief was a better story than the truth.

The truth was in the glove compartment of his Lexus, folded into thirds. It was the third letter from the bank, the one with the word *acceleration* in it.

---

David was fifty-one years old and had straightened the teeth of half of Cherry Hill. For twenty years his practice on Route 70 had been the place you went if you were a middle-school kid in Camden County with an overbite and parents who cared. He had a wall of Polaroids in the waiting room, every patient on the day the braces came off, grinning. He knew their names. He sent them birthday cards.

Then, two years ago, a company called SmileWorks had opened a shiny storefront directly across the highway. It was owned by a private-equity firm in Connecticut. It offered free consultations, Saturday hours, clear aligners mailed to your house, and a payment plan that started at forty-nine dollars a month. Within a year David had lost half of his new patients. The parents who still came in asked him, politely, if he could match the SmileWorks price.

He could not. So he had done what his father would have done. He had expanded. He had taken out a second mortgage on the house in Haddonfield and used it to buy two digital scanners, a 3D printer for aligners, a new lobby with a coffee machine and a television that played cartoons. When that wasn't enough to cover the payroll, he had quietly emptied the retirement account Lisa thought was sitting untouched at Vanguard.

He was three payments behind on the second mortgage. Lisa did not know about any of it. He had been taking the mail out of the box before she got home from her job at the library for eight months now.

It was going to be fine. That was the sentence he said to himself in the shower, in the car, in the dark at three in the morning. It was going to be fine, because eighteen months before he died, his father had sold Levin's Furniture to a national chain for a number that had made the business page of the *Inquirer*. After taxes and lawyers it came to a little over six million dollars. David had done the math on a legal pad one night at his office, after the hygienists went home. His mother would keep the house in Elkins Park and enough to live well for the rest of her life. And the rest, eventually, sensibly, would come down to the three of them.

He had not asked. You did not ask. But his mother was a practical woman, and she knew what he had been through with SmileWorks, and sooner or later there would be a conversation. Maybe today. A year was a decent interval. After the unveiling, when everyone was back at the house, eating.

He just needed it to be soon.

---

His sister arrived with four minutes to spare, which for Stacey was early.

She came up the gravel path in black flats and a black wrap dress, walking the way she had walked since she was nine years old and took her first ballet class at a studio over a hardware store in Jenkintown: shoulders down, chin level, as if someone in the back row might be grading her. Her daughter, Olivia, walked beside her, taller than her mother now, eighteen and all elbows, with her grandfather's dark eyebrows and a cardigan pulled down over her hands.

"Sorry, sorry," Stacey said, kissing David's cheek, then Lisa's. "The Schuylkill was a parking lot."

"It's always a parking lot," David said. "You know that. You leave earlier."

"Thank you, Dr. Levin. I'll write it down."

She smiled when she said it. Stacey always smiled. She had danced in the chorus of two national tours and one Broadway revival that closed in six weeks, and she had told David once that the hardest part of the job wasn't the kicks. It was smiling for two and a half hours while your feet bled. She was forty-seven now and ran a children's dance studio in Manayunk, and as far as David could tell she was still smiling through something.

He noticed her car in the lot when he glanced back: the same silver Honda she'd had since before the divorce, with a dent in the rear bumper and a rust spot spreading over the wheel well. He noticed that Olivia's sneakers were coming apart at the toe. He noticed that when Lisa asked how the studio was doing, Stacey said "Great, really great, we're full for the summer session," a little too fast.

David knew some of it. Everyone knew some of it. Three years ago, Stacey's husband, Mark Goldberg, a mortgage broker with very white teeth, had announced that he was in love with a woman from his spinning class. In the six weeks between that announcement and the day Stacey's lawyer filed the papers, Mark had moved every dollar out of their joint accounts. The judge had ordered some of it returned. Some of it had never been found.

What David didn't know, and wouldn't have guessed, was the rest. That the lease on Stacey's studio came up for renewal in September, and the landlord had sent her a letter in April doubling the rent. That Olivia had been accepted to the drama program at Carnegie Mellon, one of the best in the country, and the financial-aid package had come back with a number so small that Stacey had laughed out loud in the kitchen and then gone into the bathroom and run the water so her daughter wouldn't hear her cry.

Stacey had done her own math. A third of six million, or whatever was left of it, would fix everything. It would pay for Pittsburgh. It would pay for the studio. It would mean she could stop lying awake doing long division.

She had not asked either.

---

The baby of the family arrived last, as he always did, at a jog, in a navy blazer that was clearly borrowed because the sleeves stopped an inch above his wrists.

"I'm here, I'm here, don't start without me," Adam said, though the rabbi was still cleaning his glasses. He hugged his mother first, a real hug, lifting her an inch off the grass so that she swatted his shoulder. Then he hugged Stacey, then Olivia, then Lisa, and then he stood in front of David and grinned.

"Davey."

"Adam."

"You look like a tax return."

"Thank you. You look like you stole that jacket off a busboy."

"I *borrowed* it off a busboy. His name is Marcus. He says hi."

David couldn't help it. He laughed. That was the thing about his little brother. Even when Adam had been at his worst, even in the years when he showed up to Passover with his pupils the size of pinheads and left before the soup, he could make you laugh. It was why people had given him money.

Adam was forty-three. Six years ago he had opened a restaurant in Fishtown called Fay's, after their father's mother, and served her recipes the way she would have made them if she had trained in Paris instead of a tenement on Marshall Street. The *Inquirer* had given it four bells. A food magazine in New York had called Adam one of the ten best new chefs in America. For about eighteen months, he had been the most famous person in the family, more famous even than the jingle.

Then the cocaine. Then the vodka to come down off the cocaine. Then the missed shifts, the screaming in the kitchen, the night a line cook found him asleep on the walk-in floor at ten in the morning. Fay's had closed three years ago this July. Adam had gone to rehab in Bucks County. He was two years sober now; he had the chip in his pocket, and David had seen him touch it twice since he arrived. He cooked lunch at a hospital cafeteria in Germantown, Salisbury steak and turkey tetrazzini for nurses on their break.

And he owed his old partner, Tony Russo, eighty thousand dollars.

David didn't know that number. Nobody did. Tony was not a dangerous man. He was a retired union electrician from South Philly who had eaten one meal Adam cooked at a pop-up, shaken his hand, and put his whole savings into Fay's because, as he'd said at the opening, "I know talent when I taste it." When Fay's went under, Tony lost everything he'd put in. For two years he hadn't said a word about it. In March, he had started calling.

Adam's phone buzzed in his jacket pocket as the rabbi cleared his throat. He took it out, glanced at the screen, and put it back. David saw the name. *Tony R.*

Adam saw him see it and winked, like it was nothing. Adam had done his math too. He'd done it on the back of a cafeteria order sheet during his break. A third. Maybe less. Enough to pay Tony back every cent, with interest, and still have something left to start over. Enough to stop being the brother who had wrecked everything.

---

Rabbi Feinstein read a psalm in Hebrew and then in English. He said a few words about Leonard, about his generosity, his handshake, the way he used to stand at the door of the Roosevelt Boulevard showroom on Saturday mornings and greet customers like they were cousins. He said that at an unveiling we do not only reveal a stone. We reveal that a year has passed, that we have survived it, that the person we lost is now part of the earth and part of memory.

Then he nodded to Elaine.

David's mother stepped forward. She was sixty-nine, small and straight-backed, with short silver hair she'd had cut since the funeral. She was wearing a black pantsuit he didn't recognize and, he noticed, lipstick. A real color, a coral pink. He could not remember her wearing lipstick in his father's lifetime, except at weddings.

She took the corner of the white cloth between two fingers and pulled. It slid off the granite in one motion and she folded it over her arm, neatly, the way she folded everything.

Nobody said anything. A truck downshifted out on the Boulevard.

Then, under her breath, somebody started humming. It was Cousin Sheldon, standing behind them in a Phillies windbreaker. *Levin's, Levin's, sit right down, the comfiest couch in Philly town.* He caught himself and stopped, red-faced, and then Adam started to laugh, and then Olivia, and then even Lisa, and then everybody was humming it, softly, the whole row of them, the way the commercial had run on Channel 6 between innings for thirty years.

Elaine did not hum. She bent down, picked a small gray stone off the path, and set it on top of the headstone. She rested her hand flat beside it for a moment. She did not cry. David watched her face and could not read it at all.

Then she turned around.

"All right," she said. "Everybody come back to the house. I've got platters from Gittelman's, and there's too much whitefish, so nobody leaves until it's gone." She tucked the folded cloth under her arm. "And I have something I want to tell you."

David felt his chest loosen for the first time in months.

He looked across at Stacey and saw it on her face too, a brief, careful brightness. He looked at Adam, who was suddenly very busy studying the grass.

*Soon*, David thought. *Today.*