Melissa Schoeller

Trade-Offs and Compromises

473 days until John Hayes married the woman of his dreams (a quiet girl who always sat a row behind him in Principles of Physiology and asked all the the wrong questions), John came into class and sat down in front of said woman. Sometimes, if he angled it right, he could slip in glances of her shy smile on the reflection of his calculator screen (a smile she wouldn't show him until much later, when he returned a pencil she had dropped when packing up her things at the end of a particularly boring lecture). When he wasn't taking notes, he would tilt the calculator and factor a little piece of her into every one of his equations.

He liked to imagine what kind of person she was outside of textbooks and the Krebs Cycle, but could only analyze the little things: the way she giggled when the professor told a stupid joke (gratuitous sense of humor?) or how she would suddenly start paging through her textbook at a reference from a previous chapter (either doesn't do the readings, has a poor memory, or likes to be thorough in her knowledge. He preferred the last option). He would wait for her to push a stray lock of hair behind her ear and feel the subtle breeze from the gesture tickle the base of his neck. And so it was that 459 days before their wedding that John came into his class, sat down in front of the woman of his dreams, and decided he would actually talk to her.

As the professor started his lecture, he penned out a script of cliches no one had ever taught him to avoid: “Is that a bruise or did you fall from heaven?” “How does it feel to be the most beautiful girl in the room?” “Do you believe in love at first sight?” He planned out his hair in a quick sketch on the top-right corner of his notebook, a sweep to the right hair-do that he would quickly fix up in the bathroom during an appropriate break in the lecture. He carefully practiced where his hands should be placed in relation to the chair, whether crossed-arms was too off-putting and hand-on-her-desk too forward. He was thinking of a head-tilted-up-with-chin-on-slightly-curled-first move that would bring out the harsh strength of his jaw line. If he had one redeeming feature, that had to be it; his senior prom date always complimented his jaw line, up until the day she dumped him.

John darted out, fixed his hair, practiced his pose, and came back. He sat, stared at the blackboard, pretended to look interested, drew a chart of how the rest of the semester would go (including this girl in his plan), and took no notes. This wasn't his most successful class ever, but by the end of it, he had gotten up the courage to talk to her.

He twisted, looked in her in the eye, and forgot everything but how to say his own name and extend his hand.

She didn't smile. He clearly hadn't brought his A-game.

But she did shake his hand. “Hi, I'm Alisa.”

John grew up in Bethlehem, five blocks from his mother's church. It was a one-floor place, cozy, with a whole row of daffodils lining the back yard. They got their milk from a dairy farmer who would slip John an extra bottle during swim season. On weekends John and his friends would always wind up playing guitar in his garage because there wasn't much else to do.

When he was young, John had to accompany his mother to church. It was a beautiful building on the north side of Bethlehem, lined with stained glass and the prayers of congregation members he only knew on Sundays. His mother sang in the choir and sometimes played the organ. John's father never went to church with them. He had a church of his own, a little Lutheran building that wasn't quite big enough for everyone. John went once, but his mother didn't like that all too much. John was Catholic, that church wasn't for him – according to his mother.

John was often left alone in the pews with his thoughts on God, of which he had few to none. God was boring and couldn't help him with his math homework. So he thought about what else he could be doing: swimming, running, going to the movies, playing with his friends. There was a really cute girl next door who liked to garden in the early afternoon and he wouldn't be able to watch her if he stuck around until the end of the service.

When he went off to college, his mother put him in contact with the Catholic Fellowship adviser. John never encouraged correspondence. Academics were his religion, textbooks his bible, classes his services, and med school his holy land.

John tried to be a gentleman and impress her, but Alisa wasn't all that excited about being impressed. If he tried to take her to Capriccio's and woo her with mood-lighting, flowers, and tiny-portioned meals that served more as works of art than food, she would stiffen her back, elongate her fingers, and refuse to talk about the important things (like how she loved art museums but breezed through them, or how she came to Brown because it was more than 30 minutes by car from her house, but less than 90. That when she's sitting alone she hums old Jewish folk songs her mother taught her in order to fill the space and that she sometimes imagines their professor has a beak because it's the only way she can get through a lecture without falling asleep). All of these things she saved for more relaxing locations. It was at fancy restaurants where the focus would be redirected to John and the only thing John would get out of those meals was the realization that Alisa's eyes looked like a muddy river in candlelight.

After a few more uncomfortable meetings, he finally figured out that nice places weren't necessary to win Alisa over. When they watched a movie in the comfort of his room, curled up on his bed, she would point out all the actors she recognized and go on at length about what in the world she was going to do with the rest of her life.

John had a piece of paper taped to his wall with his life plan penned out. He would graduate this coming May with a double major in Biology and Chemistry. In two weeks he would hear back from the University of Pennsylvania Medical Labs, informing him of his acceptance to the position of research assistant for the coming year. After a year of working there and acquiring the business cards of all the right people, he would apply to medical school and get in. His residency would be completed at Johns Hopkins and at the age of 32 he would start his fellowship. Later that night, John wrote another copy of the plan with Alisa included, and hid it in his desk.

Alisa leaned against him, ignoring the movie, and examined the watch on his left wrist. “John, what do you think you're going to do?”

When he explained this plan, he gestured with his free hand, pointing out his new world that lay not so far in the distance, and puffed out his chest. He could already envision the his private practice, all the way down to organizer he would use for his very official pens and stationary. This only seemed to make Alisa more nervous.

She paused. “Sounds difficult.”

“Probably.” He dropped his arm beside him, tired from his visions. “What about you?”

“I just want to be happy.”

John was in a zoo. The loud, banging, bustling, too-many-people-in-a-small kitchen, food-smelling-too-delicious-to-sit-still, family-filled kind of zoo.

It all started right before mid-terms: Alisa burst out the question that she had quite clearly been working up to for weeks (there were moments when Alisa would come up to him, look like she was about to say something important, and then talk about the weather). “Do you want to come home with me for spring break?”

John had mentioned to her in passing that he wasn't terribly anxious to go home. What he told her was that he'd rather just focus on studying (or watching television and wandering the back-roads of Providence). In actuality, John was anxious to go to the Poconos. John's parents moved into a house in the mountains mid-way through college. He had been there before. It was where they went to get away. The house was large, with well-to-do artistic angles, and frequently stripped of its flora by deer drawn out to graze by the quiet of the neighborhood. Everything was high ceilings, lots of sunlight. In John's home in Bethlehem, John's parents worked, but in the Poconos they played golf. He couldn't imagine what they did with their time these days – they couldn't play golf all the time, could they?

“It'll be Passover, and I know it will be awkward for you because you're not Jewish and all, but you haven't met my family yet and you could always come back here if you hate it. You know, perks of proximity.”

They never talked about God, yet it was always there, whispering the difference between them. Alisa wouldn't answer her phone on Friday  night or Saturday, sundown to sundown, in order to observe the Sabbath. The closest John would come to going to church was calling his mother on Sunday afternoons and lying about having gone to some service or another (he named a different congregation every time to see if she would notice – she didn't). He'd certainly never entered a Jewish home and, more importantly, had no idea what people did on Passover. So he researched it. Extensively. He took out book after book from the library, cataloging what were considered to be typical Jewish practices on Passover. He learned about Seder plates and eating bitter food to feel the pain of generations past. There was a lot he didn't understand and when he asked Alisa about it, all she said was, “Don't worry about it. It's really boring, and no one knows anyway.”

But he had to worry about it, so he sneaked into a local temple on Saturday morning. Temple Emanuel let any student in, so he quietly stepped into the back row and tightened his tie to the point where he could barely breathe. The congregation, all mumbling and moving as one, was in the middle of some kind of silent meditation, praying directly to something he never learned to believe in.

The Rabbi stood at the front and at his call, everyone looked up. John didn't remember exactly what deep and important words the Rabbi must have. His voice was soothing but very much like his gen chem professor's (he caught up on a lot of sleep in that class). “And now we turn to page 89,” the Rabbi finished. John opened the book and turned to a page printed half in Hebrew, half in English. Before he could start reading,  song rose from the congregation. Led by no sheet music, the collective spun out melodies and harmonies in a language he couldn't speak but everyone seemed to know. He wanted to know.

And so it was that John wound up in Alisa's house in some Boston suburb, sitting in the family room and trying to not move while all the Chernicks gathered around their tiny stove, yelling about ingredients and table settings. Alisa introduced him to all of them: Aunt Sissy, Aunt Zelda, Grammy (or Bubbe, as he was told to call her), Uncle Frank, Uncle George, cousins Sam, Genie, Ariella, and David, and Ms. Debbie (John still had no idea how they were related to each other). And of course, Alisa's mother, Judith, standing proudly in front of the matzo-ball soup (guarding off people who thought they could make it better) made sure to drop her duties long enough to give him a hug.

“Alisa tells me you have a life plan,” Judith said, her accent tinted with the lingering memory of what Alisa called the Old Country. “Something about Penn and Hopkins?”

She said this while holding a large metal ladle. John tried not to feel intimidated. “I'm actually thinking of switching to Harvard Med instead.”

“Ah, so you like Boston?”

His gaze shifted over to Alisa, who was standing in a near by doorway being entertained by Uncle Frank. “It seems like the better place to be.”

“What do your parents think about that?” she asked. She twisted the ladle with her fingertips. "You're a Pennsylvania boy, no?"

He hadn't told them yet. He didn't want to explain why he wanted to stay.

During the Seder, he tried to read the four questions, a task usually left to Alisa's youngest cousin David, and proved that he could identify the history of every item on the Seder plate. He was still waiting for them to call him a useless goy and kick him out. But instead, they asked him which shul he visited (turned out shul, synagogue, and temple are all the same thing), inquired as to his interests, and gave him the option of sitting out if he ever felt uncomfortable with the more religious traditions. He never did. Later, while sitting in the family room, out of the way of the hustle and bustle of post-dessert games and singing, Alisa brought in a plate of macaroons and informed John that her family liked him.

But John didn't know what to say to Alisa, so instead he took a macaroon and swept his eyes across the room. A framed picture that hung above the mantelpiece caught his eye. Endless lines of Hebrew fit itself into a circle traced on the center of the parchment. There were buildings drawn closer to the frame, flowers filling the remaining spaces. Below the frame were pictures of the family, crowded onto the brick shelving, not so much fighting for space as squishing together so they could all share the attention.

Alisa followed his gaze. "It's a ketubah. A marriage contract. Every Jewish wedding starts with a Ketubah signing. My parents framed theirs. Most families do.”

Much later, John told Alisa a thought that planted itself in him that night, and 16 days before their wedding he officially became a Jew.

John asked Alisa to marry him. They were sitting on the green and studying for their their last ever set of finals.

“I still don't know if this is the right thing to do,” Alisa mumbled into her Psycho-pharmacology textbook. “I could go to work on a farm or something. You know - the organic thing? That seems like a better.”

“It's not,” John said a little too firmly.

Alisa, three days away from completing the premed track, was preparing herself for the downfall of going into marketing at a pharmaceutical company in August. John had always thought she wanted to go into pediatrics or something, and asked her about it. “Medicine always seemed like the appropriate path, but I'd rather not take on all those loans. I just don't want it enough.”

John broke his pencil on his notes just thinking about it and clicked it back to life vigorously. He'd planned for them to go through med school together, suffer the trials and tribulations of a future residency, but here was Alisa, ruining it all. “Everything's going to be fine,” he repeated, rocking the mantra in his lips like a parent to baby, urging it to go back to sleep. Everything had to be fine. Around them students were walking, laughing, going somewhere more fun and free than this one spot. Neither one of them could focus.

“But think about the farm. We could raise chickens or something.”

“Chickens?” The word didn't fit in his mind. He swallowed. This wasn't the time.

“Yes, chickens.” She shut her textbook. “You know my Bubbe, Estella? Her brother had a farm in Israel. Tons of chickens. I went there when I was really little. It was awesome. It was all hot and they smelled so bad.”

“Chickens are supposed to smell.”

“I know that.” She stared down at her textbook. There was a picture of a happy doctor and patient on the cover, overplayed with chemical diagrams. She poked the patients face. “And you know what I did to those chickens? I killed them. I hosed them down and then they all got hypothermia and died. But I really thought I was just cleaning them off.”

John growled and shut his text book as well. He looked up. “Fine, we can have chickens, but you have to marry me first.”

She laughed it off, thinking he was joking. It took another five hours to convince her that he was serious, and by then he was already researching engagement rings and she had brainstormed a whole list of chicken names. He never brought up her going to med school again.

John wanted to tell his mother that he was getting engaged.

John and Alisa graduated with all the pomp and circumstance that Brown ever did display. Alisa wore a beautiful dress, floral, underneath their ugly graduation robes and the vision of when she went to receive her diploma (how the fabric peeked out from beneath the robe and the way her engagement ring glinted in the sunlight) burned itself into John's memory. When he received his own, he could identify the location of Alisa's mother from how loud she cheered.

He and Alisa held hands for most of the post-ceremony congratulating (Judith flanked them, taking an unnecessary number of photographs), and when John's parents finally found him, Judith had already identified which photograph would be perfect for the save-the-date invitations.

He introduced Alisa. Alisa was on his left, hand in his, Judith on his right with an arm around his shoulders. When Alisa let go of him and reached out her hand, her fingers elongated the same way they did when he took her to the fancy restaurants in center providence. “It's nice to meet you,” his mother said and gripped Alisa's hand. It didn't like the handshake was particularly nice.

“And this is Judith, Alisa's mother. She hosted me over the break.” His mother didn't reach out her hand this time, and just nodded before Judith could even move. His father remained in the back, passive.

“You have a lovely son,” she said. “We're very excited to welcome him into our family. You should be very proud.”

His mother smiled politely and his father nodded. They didn't invite Alisa's family to eat with them, and so the three went out alone. It only occurred to him afterward that he never even told his parents formally about the engagement.

Six months before the wedding, John brought Alisa to the Pocono house. Alisa hadn't seen his parents since graduation, and he hadn't spoken with his parents for longer than 5 minutes on the phone at any given time (his mother usually answered and passed the phone quickly to his father) and perhaps a few additional words on holidays. He figured his mom would be mad, but she never said anything one way or the other. She didn't want a hand in planning the wedding, though.

Alisa and John listened to Judith's order instead. Judith had taken over everything but the song choice: Alisa would be wearing her mother's old wedding dress and they had a limit on the number of friends they were each allowed to invite. All Alisa wanted was lilies in her bouquet. Everything else she could easily leave up to fate.

John's parents hadn't sent in their RSVP card, and while John was ready to assume that they were coming, Alisa put her foot down and insisted they check. And so, with Christmas being a few days away and that night being the second night of Hannukah, John figured that they could use this as an excuse to reunite and celebrate. Alisa tried to prevent him from packing a hanukkiah (“You should at least ask them first,” she said), but John insisted. This was his new life, and he wanted to share everything he had chosen for himself with his family. They went to the Poconos, hanukkiah in tow.

“Have you picked a theme for the wedding?” John's mother asked once they had gotten settled. They were all sitting in the family room that becomes the dining room that becomes the kitchen if you walk from one end to the other. It was a really open space. If this were a less serious situation, John would probably have raced Alisa from one end to the other.

“Judith liked the idea of making it summer-themed, not that I know what that means,” John said. They were sitting in the middle, in the dining room, at the wooden table his parents picked out when they tossed the one from the Bethlehem house (the table John had learned to write on and stained when he first tried to cook cupcakes). Alisa sat at the head, so he had to twist his neck to look at her. They were sitting too far apart to even hold hands under the table. His parents (mainly his mother) had questions about the wedding, all directed at John.

Alisa jumped in anyway. “There are going to be flowers everywhere,” she said dreamily. “The bridesmaids will wear yellow.”

“It's a little early in the season for that, don't you think?” John's mother asked, again directed at her son. She looked to her husband briefly for approval, and he nodded on cue. “What was Judith thinking?”

John shrugged. Alisa stared intently at her fork. “Alisa liked the idea. I like it, too.”

“And what should we wear?” John's mother asked. She passed the potatoes to her husband automatically, a motion John recognized from when they all sat in the kitchen together, circling the food around before anyone could ask for more.

Alisa's eyes lit up. “The parents are going to wear green. My mother already picked out a gown if you want some ideas. It's really-”

“Green looks horrible on me.”

Alisa tweaked her lips up into a smile, but not the kind John used to see in the reflection of his calculator. This was a weaker sort of twitch, conciliatory. The kind she saved for fancy restaurants. “We can switch it. What color would you prefer?”

“Red.”

They separated at dinner and when John went to go fetch her for a walk, Alisa was locked in her room, crying to Judith on the phone, so he didn't knock. John decided to wait until the next day to take the hanukkiah out.

“What is that thing?” John's mother pointed angrily the next morning, her finger so rigid it look almost brittle. He put on the windowsill beside the tree. John was eating breakfast on the border between the dining and the kitchen – Life cereal.

“You celebrate Christmas, we celebrate Hanukkah. We thought it would be nice to share.” He shouted across to her. It echoed.

“What is this we? It's just her. It's just that girl! That's her family!”

“Mom, really?”

“I don't even know why you're marrying her. You have nothing in common at all.”

On Christmas Eve, John sat with Alisa in front of the Christmas tree. Some of the ornaments had survived the trip from Bethlehem to the Poconos. There was the whole set of Star Trek ornaments that John's father had collected since the start of the series, and the one John made in Kindergarten that was supposed to embody who he was as a not-quite-fully-formed-person (he colored in a J with footballs that look more like brown blobs). There was the one they bought at Disney World and two that his great-grandmother had passed down from her own tree. The rest were ones he didn't recognize, from trips his parents had taken to places he'd never get a chance to see until he probably retired; skiers from the Alps and little dolls from Japan.

“I've always wanted to celebrate Christmas,” Alisa admitted as she toyed with a shooting star hanging near the bottom. They had placed a couple presents underneath the tree, as per John's father's request (probably directed by John's mother) and Alisa was making sure everything was perfect. “I like all the lights and the decorations. It looks so magical. My holidays are really boring by comparison.”

“I don't think they are.”

“Are you sure this is what you really want to do?” Alisa let go of the ornament and started fidgeting with her engagement ring. “You can still back out, you now.”

“Everything's going to be fine.” When he said it, he really believed it. What he didn't know was that Alisa had overheard his mother yelling at anyone who would listen, including John, and that she was planning to throw the hanukkiah out the door if they tried to light it (which they did). The hanukkiah shattered when it hit the wall.

John's father woke John with the noise of a vacuum, sucking up the remaining pieces of the hanukkiah.

“Where's Mom?” John shouted. John's father shut off the vacuum.

“You probably shouldn't come back for the holidays.”

“Is that what Mom said?” John got down on his knees and picked out little pieces of wax that had stuck onto the carpet and refused to let go.

“That's what I say.” John's father wrapped up the vacuum and sat down beside him on the floor the way he might have when John was little. “She said you can come back, but the candles can't come with you.”

John didn't look up. He kept at the wax. “Is she here?”

“No. She went to church.”

“And you didn't go to yours?”

“No. Someone needed to clean this up. I wasn't going to make Alisa do it.”

John imagined his father sitting alone at church, his wife across the city of Bethlehem with their son. He imagined his father now, still alone, but in the Poconos. On Christmas.

“Are you and Mom angry at me for converting? For marrying Alisa?”

“I hardly have the right to be angry,” he said. “I married your mother. You do what you need to do.”

“And Mom?”

“I can't speak for her.”

There was a pause filled with everything they couldn't tell each other about how they were really feeling. John's father stood up, picked up the vacuum, and walked away. John and Alisa left later that afternoon. John's father apologized to Alisa and informed her politely that they probably would not be coming to the rehearsal dinner, but would be able to make it for the wedding itself.

“You should keep the dresses blue. They sound lovely.”

Alisa shook her head. “I'm taking her son. The least I can do is give her the dress.”

They had their rehearsal dinner at Legal Sea Foods, surrounded by all the most important people in his and Alisa's life: His best friend from Boy Scouts, her freshman year roommate, her aunts and uncles and their progeny, and Judith. Alisa spent her time socializing with the cousins, all of whom were fighting for her attention. John was left to entertain her mother. “I do love weddings,” Judith said, nibbling on a forkful of tuna steak.

He thought of their wedding planning sessions, which consisted of John sipping a beer while Alisa fought with Judith for the rights to the band choice. He had long since given up trying to control Alisa or her family. He laughed. “I couldn't tell.”

“I'm sorry your parents couldn't make it to the dinner.”

“Me, too.” He moved to pick up a piece of salmon. He thought of tomorrow and rehearsed it in his mind. Somewhere in his vision, he saw his mother making Alisa cry and he couldn't stomach anything more than a few oyster crackers.

“I remember when Alisa first started talking about you.” She chuckled, her voice cracking with the beginnings of old age. “She really does love you.”

“Yeah.”

She looked amused. “How are your plans going now? All those schedules.”

He thought of the things he had once wanted in his life. The medical track was still there, included in it the intention to go to Harvard Medical School and the plan for residency at Mass General. It also included having children, but instead of planning to bring his kids to his parents' 50th anniversary, he was working out bnei mitzvot. “I think I've stopped trying to plan things around this family.”

“Now you're definitely one of us.” He looked at her and noticed that she had the same muddy eyes in the evening light as her daughter, and he could see Alisa's light in this woman. He looked across at Alisa, who was laughing at something one of her cousins said, all the while fidgeting with her engagement ring. “But you know, John, I have to tell you something.” John turned back to Judith and she grabbed his hand. “If it had been me, if it had been my daughter who moved away, stayed away, and converted to a religion completely different from the one I had spent years sharing with her, I probably would have kicked her out on the spot. You're very lucky that your mother loves you so much. Give her some time, she'll come around.”

Alisa announced they were having they were having their first child as a third anniversary gift. When Alisa said that she wanted to quit her job, John wanted to stop her. What about her independence? Earning her own income? His plans hadn't banked on that, but she didn't seem to mind. “It's funny, this is the only thing I think I really really want to do,” she said as though it should make just as much sense to him. John had a whole route worked out for how to prepare for the baby, which was thrown completely off course when their daughter Stella came into the world a month early. Alisa took it all in stride, and John stopped questioning her desire to be with the baby all day, as she clearly was more suitable to worry about it than he was.

It had been a year since Judith's funeral. It was a small ceremony that felt like it contained half of the members of the Jewish community, all crammed inside the temple Alisa had been raised in. Everyone swayed together, melodies and harmonies in minor chords, mourning the loss of one of their own. He took in the words that they sang and really believed that in this group of people, with so many voices calling out in one unanimous language, something out there had to be listening. The whole while John kept Alisa as close, hoping that if they stayed near enough, no one would notice that he was crying for a woman he considered to be like his own mother.

John paid off the last of his student loans by the time his daughter had turned 5, a feat which he considered nothing if not remarkable, and to celebrate, he and Alisa spent the rest of the day perusing housing in the area, looking for an upgrade. One preferably with an extra room for the new baby they thought they were expecting. Then John found out the new baby was a cancer.

John, Alisa, and Stella sat down to Shabbat dinner, roasted chicken with cinnamon carrots and a glass of wine and Alisa announced that they would be going down to the Poconos for Christmas and Hanukkah.

“What do people do on Christmas?” Stella asked between mouthfuls of carrots. “Other than trees and Santa and presents?”

“I don't know. What do people do on Christmas, Dad?” Alisa responded and looked up at him.

John told himself that he couldn't remember. He couldn't remember drinking eggnog with his cousins and secretly spiking it with rum. He couldn't remember seeing his parents kiss softly under the mistletoe while he made vomiting noises from the couch. He couldn't remember being five years old and holding his mother's hand while they wandered the streets of Bethlehem singing carols. Because if he couldn't remember those things, he wouldn't have to talk about how much they made him miss his home.

“I don't see what gave you the right,” John said in hushed anger and glared at the road instead of at his wife. “That wasn't a decision you should have made on your own.”

“John, I'm dying-.”

“You're not dying. The doctor said your prognosis is good!”

“I can't do this anymore. The surgery is in three months and if there's some kind of complication, I don't want to go carrying this on my shoulders. I can't be blamed for taking you from your family.”

“You know I don't think that.”

“I know. It doesn't matter.”

In the back seat Stella was sleeping and if he looked in the rear view mirror the right way he could get a glimpse of his daughter's sleeping smile, reflecting a fraction of the dreams she was having. Alisa sighed.

In the periphery of his vision, he caught the sight of Alisa's beautiful brown hair, cut shorter (“More mature,” she said when she came home from the hair dresser). She cut it the day she was diagnosed, and the chemo was already thinning it further. He visualized her without any hair at all, and suddenly wanted more than anything to catch the slight breeze her hair made as she pushed it back behind her ear, at least once more.

The Pocono house was the same has John remembers it. It was the place where is family went every winter to get away. Where his father taught skiing before him, and where his daughter might one day teach, assuming the lessons stuck. It was the place he went golf ball hunting with Stella during summer vacation, when there were no holidays to make his mother hate his life choices. It was the place where all of his childhood was on display in picture frames and tucked away in closets.

They pulled into the driveway at the end of sunset and walked up to the door, John standing in front, Alisa holding Stella's hand behind him. “There's a key under the bench,” Alisa offers, but John refused to reach for it. He pushed the doorbell and it rings through the many rooms and up to the vaulted ceilings.

John's mother opened the door, the Christmas tree creating a soft lighted aura around her body. Beside the Christmas tree, peaking up over her left shoulder, was the slight glimmer of tin-foil on the window sill, waiting for John's family's Hanukkah. Only then did John realize how much he had missed her.

“Welcome home, John.”