An Excerpt from Simple Wishes

Simple Wishes

For her twelfth birthday, a classmate gave Adele a book of New York City in photographs. The pages were thick and glossy. The binding creaked in her hands. She said thank you to her friend, and at recess, while the other students hung out in clusters near the chain-link fences of the school yard, she sat alone against the brick of the science building, where no one could see.

Black and white pictures captivated her with scenes of the city: stoic skyscrapers, lonely park benches, bicycles chained to street signs, a snow-covered police car, and people—so many, many people. They sat on wide concrete stairs, handed money to street vendors, huddled shoulder to shoulder on cramped buses, and held hands in the park. It was the people that captivated Adele the most—the pleasure of looking intimately, of judging without being judged.

After school, she brought the book home to show her mother. Marge glanced at it, then looked away.

“What are you gonna do with a book like that?” she asked. She was cutting an onion against a wooden board, each movement making her upper arm jiggle.

Adele’s palms sweated against the shiny cover. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m gonna keep it?”

She sat down at the kitchen table and ran her fingertips over the pages. Her mother set out a glass of milk and a few oven-warm cookies. Adele didn’t touch them. She stared at the pictures hard, adoring them desperately, but somehow unsatisfied.

“Will you take me to New York? To the Statue of Liberty?” she asked.

“You don’t wanna go to New York,” her mother said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s dirty.” Marge mashed a clove of garlic with the back of a big spoon, and the smell bloomed warmly in the kitchen. “No place for a daughter of mine.”

“It is not dirty. Our yard is dirty. We don’t even have a real sidewalk.”

“That’s enough.” Marge wiped her hands on a towel and reached for the book. “Let me see that.” She flipped through the pages, her glasses on the tip of her nose and her neck bent so that her chin sagged into her chest. Adele watched her mother closely. She imagined that her father—who’d died before she could remember—would have taken her into New York to feed the pigeons, just like the photographs showed.

Marge tucked the book under her arm and walked away.

“What are you doing?” Adele asked, following.

“You don’t need this giving you ideas,” Marge said. The bedroom door swung shut behind her.

Adele stood there, dumbstruck. She fought the sudden urge to drag her fingers over her face, to give in to self-pity. She knew, from the moment she showed the book to her mother, that there was a chance it would be taken away. And yet, she hadn’t been able to stop herself. She’d practically run home from school with it in her hands, knowing her mother would be in the kitchen, waiting. She had no one to blame but herself.

She should have pretended the book meant nothing.

When Marge emerged from her bedroom, the book was not in her hands. She re-locked the door behind her and stood so that the fading light of day cast a reddish hue on the white of her apron. Though not tall, she was a big woman, with wide shoulders and thick hips and legs. Someday Adele might meet her eye, if she managed to grow a few more inches. Now, she could only look at her own hands, clasped before her belly.

“Will you ever give it back?” she asked quietly.

“Don’t worry,” her mother said. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

Adele didn’t blink.

“Now go do your homework. I’ll call you later for dinner and cake.”

She went upstairs, her goose bumps rising because the kitchen was the only warm room in the house. The smell of Marge’s cooking drifted up the stairs, snuck under the closed door of Adele’s bedroom, and saturated the air with the scent of simmering vegetables, spices, and meat. Her stomach growled. She sat down at her desk to work.

Later, she would forget all about the book, about New York. Years would pass before she would remember—and when she did, the smell of glossy pages and the romance of black and white sidewalks would rise up out of her memory as if it were coming from the marrow of her bones.

But now, she simply did her homework, agonizing over every curling letter of every word she wrote, and she waited for her mother to call her downstairs to eat. She had no expectation that Marge would make up for the theft of her pictures. And yet, deep down, she would hold her to the promise just the same.