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Esther stops about two steps away from her mother’s new door and Ricky, bless him, somehow manages not to walk right into her despite her sudden impersonation of a statue in the middle of a hallway.
There’s a glint of silver on the frame, right about at shoulder height.
It’s been less than a week.
Esther vaguely recalls something about needing to get a Mezuzah up within 30 days, and despite the fact that Gabriela’s been a Fury living in a park for twenty years, she somehow beat that with time to spare.
Does her mother still know people at temple? Do they still know her?
Does Patricia, despite it being even longer?
Ricky hums quietly, and Esther shakes her head to settle her thoughts.
She doesn’t know what to do with any of that, so she files it away for later and knocks on her mother’s door.
She doesn’t touch the Mezuzah on her way in, though she thinks about it.
Ricky brings it up before she can decide how she wants to, wrapping his arms around her as she’s staring blankly at the electric kettle a few days later, trying to decide what sort of tea she wants to make.
He rests his forehead against the back of her head, warm and steady and requiring neither of them to make eye contact unless or until she decides to turn around.
She loves him so much it’s deeply terrifying, even without her Curse.
The kettle beeps, but she doesn’t move out of his arms.
“You don’t do the candles or anything on Friday nights.”
She snorts, oddly delighted by this entirely sideways question about something he thinks of as Jewish that she doesn’t do, something beyond the fact that he recognized her mother’s Mezuzah for what it was. (Hard not to, considering all the doors he probably crashed through as a fireman in New York of all cities.)
It’s easier, somehow, that he did this rather than make the observation that she doesn’t have one on her door frame, and never has.
“No, I don’t.” She sighs. “Gabriela fell into her Curse when I was five, and Patricia fell before I was even born. They certainly didn’t raise me into any traditions.”
“And Eli?” Ricky is always especially careful when he mentions her father. She understands why, can feel how indignant Ricky is at the thought that anyone would cut ties the way Eli has, but they’d had to be aggressively impersonal with each other, or she never would have made it through puberty.
And for all they’ll probably never see each other again, too much pain that neither of them could ever address, she knows he never would have forgiven himself if he’d failed to protect her from the Curse when she was still just a child.
“Faith was his escape from what the Curse took from all of us.” His observances were, she thinks, the only time he really let himself feel like a human being during the fourteen years he’d raised her by himself. “He couldn’t risk including me in something that was that emotional for him.”
She can practically hear Ricky frown into her hair, which is adorable. “But that stopped you from getting to know something that might have helped you, something that was important to your mother.”
“Maybe.” Esther turns around now, kisses the wrinkle between Ricky’s eyebrows as soon as she can see it. “But I didn’t want it then, and now I can ask my mother what it means to her, which might be nice.”
“You didn’t ask her about it when we were there.”
“No, not yet,” Esther shakes her head. “I’m still angry at her for everything she couldn’t control, and crying at everything else every day,” she is, in fact, crying right now, slow soft tears overflowing down her cheeks, “and I’m happier than I ever thought I could be.”
She has to stop to kiss Ricky then, and he kisses her back, so incredibly warm and solid around her.
(Someday, they’ll have a day when not a single one of their kisses tastes of salt.
She’s not there yet.)
“There’s this ache, you know?” He does know, she knows, they’ve glanced against the one he’s got, about being able to speak his parents’ language but barely read or write it, about being the Asian boy in the remedial math class and how much easier it was with an American name, about watching his sister hold onto her given name and wondering how much he’d hurt his parents when he didn’t.
Her mother is Jewish, her mother’s mother, her father and her father’s mother, but she doesn’t know if she is, if she was, if she can be, if she’s enough.
She tries to keep going. “There’s this hollow place where there ought to be family and tradition and history and–”
He kisses her again as her voice catches in her throat, pulls away to let her breathe.
“There’s no connection there, because other people couldn’t or didn't or wouldn't share it, and someday when I’m ready I’ll ask my mother and my grandmother about theirs, see what we can build together now that we’ve finally got the chance.”
She smiles through her tears, leans forward to try and get herself even closer to Ricky.
“For now I’ve got yours, and Alejandro gave me Gramercy, and Sofie and Ana and Amelia and,” she stops with a damp hiccup, and can't remember what else she was going to say. Ricky's looking at her, in that way that no one else ever has, (no one else ever could), the way that added to that ache when she was still Cursed, the way that heals it now, now that she’s made it out the other side.
“I love you.”
