Николас Спаркс - The Longest Ride

Ruth was always more bothered by their relationship than either of them seemed to be. My parents seemed to have little desire to bridge the gap between them. They were comfortable in their own worlds. As they aged, while my father grew closer to his heritage, my mother developed a passion for gardening, and she spent hours pruning flowers in the backyard. My father loved to watch old westerns and the evening news, while my mother had her books. And, of course, they were always interested in the artwork Ruth and I collected, the art that eventually made us rich.

“You didn’t come back to the shop for a long time,” I said to Ruth.

Outside the car, the snow has blanketed the windshield and continues to fall. According to the Weather Channel, it should have stopped by now, but despite the wonders of modern technology and forecasting, weather predictions are still fallible. It is another reason I find the channel interesting.

“My mother bought the hat. We had no money for anything more.”

“But you thought I was handsome.”

“No. Your ears were too big. I like delicate ears.”

She’s right about my ears. My ears are big, and they stick out in the same way my father’s did, but unlike my father, I was ashamed of them. When I was young, maybe eight or nine, I took some extra cloth from the shop and cut it into a long strip, and I spent the rest of the summer sleeping with the strip wrapped around my head, hoping they would grow closer to my scalp. While my mother ignored it when she’d check on me at night, I sometimes heard my father whispering to her in an almost affronted tone. He has my ears , he’d say to her. What is so bad about my ears?

I told Ruth this story shortly after we were married and she laughed. Since then, she would sometimes tease me about my ears like she is doing now, but in all our years together, she never once teased me in a way that felt mean.

“I thought you liked my ears. You told me that whenever you kissed them.”

“I liked your face. You had a kind face. Your ears just happened to come with it. I did not want to hurt your feelings.”

“A kind face?”

“Yes. There was a softness in your eyes, like you saw only the good in people. I noticed it even though you barely looked at me.”

“I was trying to work up the courage to ask if I could walk you home.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. Though her image is blurred, her voice is youthful, the sixteen-year-old I’d met so long ago. “I saw you many times at the synagogue after that, and you never once asked me. I even waited for you sometimes, but you went past me without a word.”

“You didn’t speak English.”

“By then, I had begun to understand some of the language, and I could talk a little. If you had asked, I would have said, ‘Okay, Ira. I will walk with you.’”

She says these last words with an accent. Viennese German, soft and musical. Lilting. In later years her accent faded, but it never quite disappeared.

“Your parents wouldn’t have allowed it.”

“My mother would have. She liked you. Your mother told her that you would own the business one day.”

“I knew it! I always suspected you married me for my money.”

“What money? You had no money. If I wanted to marry a rich man, I would have married David Epstein. His father owned the textile mill and they lived in a mansion.”

This, too, was one of the running jokes in our marriage. While my mother had been speaking the truth, even she knew it was not the sort of business that would make anyone wealthy. It started, and remained, a small business until the day I finally sold the shop and retired.

“I remember seeing the two of you at the soda parlor across the street. David met you there almost every day during the summer.”

“I liked chocolate sodas. I had never had them before.”

“I was jealous.”

“You were right to be,” she says. “He was rich and handsome and his ears were perfect.”

I smile, wishing I could see her better. But the darkness makes that impossible. “For a while I thought the two of you were going to get married.”

“He asked me more than once, and I would tell him that I was too young, that he would have to wait until after I finished college. But I was lying to him. The truth was that I already had my eye on you. That is why I always insisted on going to the soda parlor near your father’s shop.”

I knew this, of course. But I like hearing her say it.

“I would stand by the window and watch you as you sat with him.”

“I saw you sometimes.” She smiles. “I even waved once, and still, you never asked to walk with me.”

“David was my friend.”

This is true, and it remained true for most of our lives. We were social with both David and his wife, Rachel, and Ruth tutored one of their children.

“It had nothing to do with friendship. You were afraid of me. You have always been shy.”

“You must be mistaking me for someone else. I was debonair, a ladies’ man, a young Frank Sinatra. I sometimes had to hide from the many women who were chasing me.”

“You stared at your feet when you walked and turned red when I waved. And then, in August, you moved away. To attend university.”

I went to school at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I didn’t return home until December. I saw Ruth twice at the synagogue that month, both times from a distance, before I went back to school. In May, I came home for the summer to work at the shop, and by then World War II was raging in Europe. Hitler had conquered Poland and Norway, vanquished Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and was making mincemeat of the French. In every newspaper, in every conversation, the talk was only of war. No one knew whether America would enter the conflict, and the mood was grim. Weeks later, the French would be out of the war for good.

“You were still seeing David when I returned.”

“But I had also become friends with your mother in the year you were gone. While my father was working, my mother and I would go to the shop. We would speak of Vienna and our old lives. My mother and I were homesick, of course, but I was angry, too. I did not like North Carolina. I did not like this country. I felt that I did not belong here. Despite the war, part of me wanted to go home. I wanted to help my family. We were very worried for them.”

I see her turn toward the window, and in the silence, I know that Ruth is thinking about her grandparents, her aunts and uncles, her cousins. On the night before Ruth and her parents left for Switzerland, dozens of her extended family members had gathered for a farewell dinner. There were anxious good-byes and promises to stay in touch, and although some were excited for them, nearly everyone thought Ruth’s father was not only overreacting, but foolish to have given up everything for an uncertain future. However, a few of them had slipped Ruth’s father some gold coins, and in the six weeks it took to journey to North Carolina, it was those coins that provided shelter and kept food in their stomachs. Aside from Ruth and her parents, her entire family had stayed in Vienna. By the summer of 1940, they were wearing the Star of David on their arms and largely prohibited from working. By then, it was too late for them to escape.

My mother told me about these visits with Ruth and their worries. My mother, like Ruth, still had family back in Vienna, but like so many, we had no idea what was coming or just how terrible it would eventually be. Ruth didn’t know, either, but her father had known. He had known while there was still time to flee. He was, I later came to believe, the most intelligent man I ever met.

“Your father was building furniture then?”