Coffee, Leba decides, is the first thing that must be done.
She decides this while still in bed, wrapped in soft gray darkness. The house is quiet, or as quiet as it ever is during the winter, when its bones creak nearly as much as her own. It’s even money on whether Esther is still asleep, although Leba thinks she must be - otherwise she’d probably be back to rattling around in the spare room. God bless Jim and the tincture he’d brought for Esther’s tea; it’s the only sleep either have them have gotten, over the last few days.
Coffee, Leba thinks, and pushes herself upright, reaching for her housecoat. The heater in the basement thunks and clicks through the walls, as if in agreement.
She leaves the lights off as she makes her way down the stairs. Hannah chides her about walking around in the dark, as if Leba hasn’t been making breakfast in the same kitchen for going on thirty years - and really, she’s only fallen the one time. She peeks down the hallway on the ground floor, and sighs when she sees light coming from under Esther’s door. At least she doesn’t have to worry that banging around in the kitchen will wake her aunt up.
She makes a full pot, and uses the good beans from Porto Rico, her favorite coffee shop in the Lower East Side that Hannah makes a monthly pilgrimage to on their behalf. Company’s not to be expected until later tonight, but there’s a lot of work to be done and Sam and Jim promised to come by later to help. Debrief was the word that Jim used, but after whatever that means Leba’s plan is to make him dust all the high places she can’t reach as well anymore.
She pours herself a cup as soon as the percolator quits, but stands holding it under her chin for a long time, staring out the kitchen window. It’s snowing again. Thick, serene drifts gathering along her fence posts, but a high wind is whipping their trees bare. The city’s pretty good about keeping their street swept, but it’s a bad day for travel. Leba’s sure there’ll be cancellations out at JFK. Not that they’ll be travelling on a commercial flight, probably. She’ll text Jim to ask if the plane has left yet, if a cab’ll be too much trouble in the snow, if Jim and Sam should go to the airport instead.
A door opens in the hallway, and Leba snaps out of her daze. “Esther?” she calls. No answer but the click of the spare room opening and closing again. Leba sets her mug down, and goes to get another from the cupboard. It’s Esther’s favorite mug, a gift last year from Eezee, which says: A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance . She tops the coffee with a little milk - Esther never had gotten a taste back for sugar, after all her years of enthusiastic rationing - and takes it on back.
“Esther?” she calls, and raps her knuckles against the open door. No answer. Leba opens it anyway, figuring that if Esther wants to complain about it Leba can say she assumed she’d left her hearing aids in the bedroom.
The spare room looks mostly as they’d left it last night: a mess. There are papers spread out along the floor and the desk and the dresser and the little twin bed. Leba’s made some effort to tidy everything over the last few days, sorting photographs and documents and newspaper clippings into their own little piles, but every morning Esther comes and moves it all around, organizing according to some catalog she hasn’t bothered to share. It’s what she’s up to now, leaning heavily on her walker to move a sheaf of photographs from the foot of the bed up towards the head. Leba sees with satisfaction that she’s left the boxes of clothes and knick knacks in the corner - they’re heavy enough that moving them around should be left up to the boys
“You hungry?” Leba asks. She sets the coffee down on one of the doilies on the bedside table. Esther’s hair is still set in curlers, covered with a little handkerchief. Her shoulders are bare and goose pimpled, and Leba doesn’t wait for an answer as she goes to fetch Esther’s housecoat.
“Oh, bless you, Leba honey,” Esther says when she returns, most of her attention still on the dusty old pages spread out around her. “I’m famished, thank you. What’s for breakfast?”
“Boiled eggs and toast,” Leba answers, clearing off the chair so she can sit, “or leftover Chinese.” The room is thick with old dust, tickling her nose.
Esther makes a disappointed noise, and Leba frowns at her. “It’s that or I don’t start cooking on time,” she warns, and Esther sighs, very put upon.
On the desk is a scrapbook, old and heavy, with a leather cover and the kind of binding you can undo yourself to add in more pages. It’s about full to bursting, little scraps of paper peeping out here and there, faded with age. Leba leafs through it idly as she drinks her coffee, Esther’s puttering a comfortable white noise.
The book had lived in Esther’s room at their old house on New York Avenue, and the pages still smell faintly of the coal smoke. The clippings inside are glued haphazardly, without real regard to chronology. An advertisement for a USO show at Madison Square Garden cozies up to a thin news bulletin about Belgium, the relevant passage circled in ink. Two pages are torn and badly mended; they’d been torn by Leba herself when she was small enough to sit in her mother’s lap, too small to turn the stiff pages by herself. She’d liked the trading cards, and tried to pull off the one of the funny man in blue, giving her a salute.
“Seventy three years,” Esther says, and laughs. She reaches over to smooth one hand over the yellowed sheets, curled only a little bit at the edges. “Do you think he’ll still want to read his clippings?”
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Leba says. She pats Esther’s hand. “Go on, take a bath and get dressed. I’ll help you with the new book when you’re presentable.”
“You can help give me a better breakfast than toast and eggs,” Esther retorts, but she takes her walker and herself off to the bath.
The dough must come first, but not before a second cup of coffee, and not before Leba turns the radio on to CD101: Smooooth Jazz, New York City Style, Nice and Easy . She puts on a pot of water to boil up some eggs while the milk and sugar and yeast foams, Esther’s complaints be damned. There’s too much to be done for a real breakfast.
Flour and salt meet the yeast mixture in Leba’s big stand mixer, which Abe had bought for her when her the arthritis in her wrists made it too difficult to bake sugary treats as often as he’d become accustomed to. (Six years widowed, and she still sometimes reaches for him in the night.) She stands back and smugly watches the dough hook do the work, singing along to Gloria Estefan under her breath.
The dough goes under a towel to rest, and she gets to work on the lasagna: two full trays of pasta, ricotta, spinach, and sauce, which can keep just fine tightly covered in the fridge until it’s time to pop them in the oven. When Abe was alive he could hoover up a quarter tray by himself, and Leba knows how soldiers can eat. She’ll round out dinner with latkes, a big green salad, and dinner rolls from the Hungarian bakery up over on Queens Boulevard.
The bath has turned off by the time she’s finished with the lasagna, but Esther was a slow dresser even before she turned ninety three, and anyway Leba knows there’s still plenty of time.
She vacuums the living room, and the halls, and the stairs, step by step. The vacuum cleaner is one of those new fancy ones. Hannah had badgered her into buying it when the old one finally gave up the ghost. It weighs only four pounds, and keeps a charge, so there’s no heavy cord to drag along behind. The one she’d had before had lived more than twenty years: a violently red monstrosity that had weighed upward of thirty pounds and needed most of her full weight to switch the button from carpet to tile. She still misses the burned carpet smell it would leave in its wake.
As she cleans, she listens: for Esther, for the phone to ring, for the gasping rattle of little Stevie’s car coming up the road. Her old bones don’t move as well as they used to, but her mother had always taught her that keeping a body busy was the best way to quiet a mind. She’d taken up crochet to give her hands and mind something better to do than listen to Abe’s heart monitor. Quit smoking to be able to fret about something other than Hannah’s sobriety. Taken Eezee to temple each week, let singing and praying drown out their grief over Jim’s death, and then un-death.
She dusts. Each lace doily goes to the bathroom to wait for Jim to give them a good shake out in the yard. She opens up the curio cabinet to dust each little object in turn, and the shelves that they sit on. Most of her little treasures came from the travels she and Abe had together, but some of them are tin toy memorabilia, in the shapes of shields and soldiers and bears in natty blue coats. She leaves the high places and the bookshelves for Jim. She cleans the front windows with vinegar and newspaper, moving the menorah and its oily contents aside carefully. She throws out old, dusty potpourri, and refills the jars from a new bag, bought specially: cinnamon, dried orange peels, little pine cones painted gold.
By the time all of this is done, Esther has shuffled from bathroom to the spare room to her bedroom and then back again to the spare room, and the back of the house is quiet. The snow’s still coming down outside, and it makes the house feel warm and close. She checks on the dough: still rising. Checks her phone: a message from Jim, that he and Sam are on their way. The plane left hours ago, and should arrive right as expected.
In the spare room she finds again what she’s expecting, which is Esther sitting on the floor, only a cushion between her bony bottom and the thin rug. She’s wearing that nice floral dress Leba likes so much, with the gauzy sleeves. Her hair is neatly curled, and her makeup is fresh. She’s holding a photograph in her hands: a handsome young man, wearing the same suit that’s folded carefully in the box in the corner. His baby sister perched on his knee, her curly hair up in pigtails. That little blond schmendrick behind them, thumbs hooked into his suspenders.
Esther looks up, her eyes swimming through the thick lenses of her glasses. “ Oh no,” Leba says immediately. “ No crying. If you cry, I cry, and then there will be no sufganiyot for our guests.”
“Oh, well,” Esther agrees, sniffling. “That would be a tragedy.”
Leba hands her a tissue and tells her gently, “Get off the damn floor before you hurt yourself.”
They’d gone down to the dollar store the same day Sam had called, and bought a brand new scrapbook. The cover is plastic, a shocking pink leopard print that Esther had thought would be hilarious. It has sticky plastic sheets over each page so you can rearrange what’s underneath as many times as you’d like. They’d started pulling boxes down the same night they’d bought it, and drank a bottle and a half of sherry between them while they sorted through it all. The sherry had pained Leba’s angina something terrible the next day, almost as much as her back had pained her after hours of sitting bent over on the couch.
They’d meant to start the scrapbook that night, and each night since. Every morning over breakfast Esther has reminded Leba about it, as if she was the one holding them back. The furthest they’d gotten, before getting lost in stories and regrets and tears and laughter and sherry, was to draw out a shaky family tree.
They paste the tree into the first page. Esther sits on the edge of the bed, handing Leba memories piece by piece. Baby photos of Leba and her brother James, Jim’s namesake. Uncle Frank and Aunt Bernilda’s wedding photo, taken on the deck of the ship he’d been serving on, before they’d sailed for home. A photo of their twins, brown little boys trying to squirm out of Mom’s arms, all of them squinting under a Kodachrome sun. Three mugshots from Esther’s protest years, black-eyed and tear gassed. Abe teaching Eezee to swim in a rec center pool, Jim in the background preparing to cannonball them both.
Some of the photos they’d had to ask Hannah for, like Uncle Frank in the uniform he’d worn to Korea, which hadn’t been that different than the one he’d worn to the Philippines. Esther in her graduation gown, curls nearly bursting out from under the stiff mortarboard, Mom’s arms around her. Jim in his Army portrait, which hadn’t been that different than one taken of Bucky, seventy years earlier. Esther’s parents on their wedding day: Grandma Naema’s dark curls covered by a crown of flowers, Grandpa Peter looking dapper in a suit coat, the two of them turned towards each other, smiling.
“I wish your mother were here,” Esther says as Leba sets the photo, smoothing both hands gently along the plastic cover. “Becca and Bucky were so close. Oh, I wish my mother was here, I wish all of them were here. I miss them all so much.”
Me too , Leba thinks, because she’s old enough to know that no one is ever too old to miss their mother. “Just her latke recipe,” she says. “And us.”
Esther smiles, and places her hands over Leba’s, who turns her palms upward. Esther’s hands are dry and smooth in her own. “And us,” Esther agrees.
The boys arrive a little after lunch, bearing potatoes and English Breakfast tea and apples and steel wool. “Well?” is the first thing out of Esther’s mouth, even before they’ve even got their coats and hats off.
“They’re two hours out,” Sam tells her. “They’re coming in to a private airfield in Queens.”
“Yeesh,” Jim says, “we don’t even say hi before getting the third degree?”
“We need you to run to the store,” Leba informs him. Jim freezes, bent awkwardly over the partially undone laces of his boots. “We don’t have any currant jam. Only apricot.”
“Currant jam?” Esther asks, sounding baffled.
“We were just at the store,” James says. “Why didn’t you call when we were already atthe store.”
“You said currant was his favorite,” Leba says to Esther, nodding her head at the little circles of dough spread out on the counter, covered with dry clean towels.
“I’m not sure Key Foods will have currant jam,” Esther says doubtfully, as Jim exclaims, “Oh hell yeah, doughnuts!”
In the end, Jim is sent back out to the store - this time for seedless raspberry jam and steel wool and Italian dressing and a nice bottle of red wine, I don’t know what kind, Jim, whatever you think will taste nice with lasagna - and Sam is set to polishing the silver.
Leba lifts a corner of the towel off the rising doughnuts - they’ve about doubled in size. She nods in satisfaction. She asks over her shoulder, “You want some coffee, Sammy?”
“Sure, thank you,” Sam says.
When she turns around with mug in hand, he hasn’t even opened up the flatware chest. He’s sitting at the kitchen counter with both hands on a folder. It’s battered and old, and slivers of color photographs peek out the sides. The lettering on the front is Russian. He pushes it across the counter. Leba puts the coffee down on top of it.
“What’s that, honey?” Esther calls from the living room. She can’t sit on the kitchen stools anymore, so the armchair by the window is her throne during family gatherings.
“Nothing important,” Leba calls back. Sam makes a frustrated noise, and retrieves his folder from under the coffee mug.
“Oh, Sam,” Esther sighs. “Can’t that wait? You’ve only just arrived. Drink your coffee and tell us what you’ve been up to. How’s your mother doing? We got a lovely Hanukkah card from her.”
“She’s fine, Auntie,” Sam answers. “But we need to talk about this before they get here. There are certain things you really should know about him and what he’s - ”
“Don’t worry so much, sweetness,” Esther tells him, rearranging the blanket on her shoulders. “He doesn’t need to remember us. Leba and I have probably forgotten more than you know, this will go fine.”
“Maybe he’ll remember that raspberry jam was his second favorite flavor,” Leba says, sticking the handle of a wooden spoon into the hot oil. It bubbles satisfyingly, and she can turn her back on Sam to start dropping dough circles one by one into the pot. “Maybe he’ll remember that family doesn’t lie to each other.”
“We didn’t lie to you,” Sam says, in the same tone of voice Leba’s heard him use on the television, in front of the news cameras. His superhero voice . “We just - didn’t tell you the whole truth.”
“Two years of you jetting off in that bird costume with Steve Rogers to fight evil robots,” Leba says to the bubbling sufganiyot, “two years of not lying -”
“Bird costume,” Sam mutters, and at that Leba does turn around.
“What was that? Speak up!” she snaps.
“I’m trying to -” Sam says and then stops, his jaw working around whatever else he wants to say. He sighs and flips open the top of the flatware chest, pulls out a stack of forks. His nose wrinkles from the smell of the silver polish. He looks tired. Leba’s conscience twitches.
She turns back to the stove, retrieves the first batch of sufganiyot from the pot. They’re beautifully golden. She lets them rest on a thick bed of paper towels while she gets the next batch into the oil, and then covers them with a fine dusting of powdered sugar. They’ll be cool enough to handle before Jim comes back from the store, and get apricot jam piped into the middle: apricot jam, after all, being Sam’s favorite.
She doesn’t look at the manila folder, still sitting out on the countertop.
Sam finds his words midway through the second batch, as Leba’s starting to contemplate the mountain of potatoes that need to be washed and grated for latkes. He sets down the silver polish and scrubs the back of one hand over his forehead.
“Auntie Esther, Auntie Leba - I’m sorry,” he says, and this time only sounds like her nephew’s husband, like family. “I brought the dossier to try and explain why Cap and I needed to maintain opsec. We needed - we didn’t know if it was safe for him to know where you were. If you read it, you’ll understand.”
His stool scrapes against the tile as he pushes it back, and goes to sit on the couch next to Esther’s chair. He holds out his hand, and Esther takes it between both of hers. “Thank you for explaining,” she says, very gently. “But we don’t need to read it. I’m sure you think we’re being stubborn old ladies, Sam. But - trust us to know what’s best, will you?”
Sam is searching her eyes. He says, slowly, “I do trust you. It was my call to tell you that Bar - that, mmm, Bucky was still alive. Trusting that you could handle the truth was part of it.”
“We can, Sam,” Esther says, and pats Sam’s hand. “My brother is coming home. He’s finally coming home. That’s what matters.”
Sam shakes his head, but he’s interrupted by Jim banging through the front door, bringing cold air and a whirl of snow in with him. “Aw man,” he says, when he sees the look on all their faces. “I thought for sure you guys’d be done talking about all the serious shit by now.”
“Thanks, babe,” Sam says, “Real glad you got my back on this one.”
“Sure thing,” Jim says, and leans over the back of the couch to give Sam a kiss.
The snap of the oil brings Leba’s attention back to the stove, and she gets the last batch of doughnuts frying. Jim’s heavy step on the tile warns her before a cold kiss is pressed into her cheek. He leans a hip up against the countertop, looking with interest at the piles of filled and dusted sufganiyot. “You guys ain’t givin him too hard a time, are you?” he asks, pointing his chin back towards Sam.
“He’ll be fine,” Leba says. “He fights robots for fun. His sense of proportion is beyond help.”
Jim shrugs. “Bucky did almost murder him a couple times,” he says. “Mostly he’s just worried about you guys, though.”
“You think this household doesn’t know trouble?” Leba asks. “We lived through Koch, Reagan, and Giuliani.”
“You know what I mean,” Jim says. “He loves you guys, he doesn’t want to see you hurt.”
“Was it all that bad?” Leba asks, jerking her chin towards the folder still sitting on the counter, now with a fine dusting of powdered sugar.
“Yeah,” Jim answers, steadily. “Yeah, he did a lot of bad stuff.”
Both of them look over at Esther reflexively. She looks so small in her armchair - so old - her walker within easy reach, her back bent under all the years she’d carried the Barnes family through. Her hair beginning to frizz a little in the humid air of the kitchen, her makeup still neat. Leba clears her throat, and pokes her wooden spoon carefully into the hot oil, watching the surface of it bubble and spit around the browning dough. Jim’s never seen her cry, and she’d like to keep it that way.
“Aw,” Jim says softly. “Look, it’s okay. Sam really does trust him to be here. If he doesn’t remember his favorite foods, these’ll be his favorite.”
Leba swats at him with the handle of the spoon, careful not to swing grease at her nephew. Jim laughs. “Hey, forreal,” he says. “Look, Sam’s just worried cuz he thought Bucky was a real asshole. He doesn’t want to have to fight the guy in your home, but he will.”
“Hmph,” Leba sniffs. “Well, you can take him a doughnut when you’ve finished grating the potatoes. They’re apricot, he likes apricot.”
“Oooooh,” James says, reaching for the pile, and laughs when Leba slaps his hand away.
James polishes the silver, after he grates his way through the bag of potatoes. Sam takes the pile of doilies outside to shake them out, and carefully restores them to their homes, snowflakes melting in his goatee. The lasagna goes in the oven, and the house fills with the smell of bubbling sauce and cheese. They turn on the record player. Sam looks through the new scrapbook with Esther, listening to stories he’s probably already heard. They open a bottle of wine. James moves the other memory-filled boxes out into the living room, and then back into the spare room when it’s decided that maybe they should just stick with scrapbooks tonight. They wait.
The onions are almost finished browning (Leba’s mother had always cooked latkes that way, preferring the sweet, crispy taste to the bite of raw onion, and she’s never cooked them any differently) when Esther startles her with a shout. “It’s time to light the candles!” she says.
“Esther Shoshanna Barnes, you about gave me a heart attack,” Leba says, shaking the spatula.
“Me too,” Jim says faintly. He brings Leba the shamash to light in the kitchen, taking the opportunity to grab more refreshments for their family.
“Look, it’s almost nightfall,” Esther says as she brings the lit candle to the window, shielding it carefully with one hand. She’s smiling from ear to ear. Even Sam looks more relaxed, or at least placated with apricot sufganiyot and wine.
“I don’t know you can even see it through all that snow,” Leba says, though the gray light has shifted just as Esther says. Bucky and Steve Rogers must be close, she thinks, and looks up and down the quiet street. Their neighbors cars are heaped high with snow, but the road is clear and empty.
Leba uses oil in her menorah, always has, except for one year that Abe thought maybe the beeswax candles a nice young haredi man gave him on the subway would make a good substitute. When she’d had been a little girl, she’d liked to watch the oil shimmer, the light landing softly on the old polished metal. The menorah had been a wedding gift to Leba’s grandmother, and it had shone in the windows of the Barnes home through Esther and Bucky’s childhoods too.
“Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the universe, who performed miracles for our forefathers in those days, at this time,” Leba says, to the candles and the gathering darkness just on the other side of the glass.
“Lovely,” Esther says, after a moment of silence. “Well, Sam - I know you already know the story of Hanukkah, so how about we play some euchre?”
“Only if we don’t make cash bets this time,” Sam says, but his wary voice seems to come from far away. Leba had been watching the light bounce around the window pane, the little oil jars, the soft sheen of the menorah, and so she’s the only one looking out the window as two more lights appear and make a tentative path down their street. She’s the only one looking as the car pulls into the driveway, and the headlights turn off, and the car doors open - so she’s the first to see the miracle walking up to their door.