Read Online Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online

exotic?”
    Henry said, “Irene. Everyone in San Francisco knows about pesto and tapenade. They’re like salt and pepper!”
    “Well, I don’t think everyone knows what tapenade is,” Irene said, and Henry closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he said, “You’re a Minne so tan. Your people just discovered that lemon juice doesn’t have to come from a green bottle. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s so benighted!”
    One of these days she’s going to hand him the recipe for pigs in a blanket. For Lipton onion soup dip, which she happens to think is divine.
    By the time Sadie comes home, Irene has fallen asleep with a cookbook opened to a page with a recipe for glazed tofu that calls for yuzu peel and shiso leaf and dashi kombu. She awakens to thesound of her daughter’s voice, and gets out of bed to go and stand before Sadie’s closed bedroom door. She knocks gently. She hears Sadie say, “I’ll call you back,” then, “Yeah?”
    “Can I come in?”
    “Yeah!”
    Irene pushes open the door and stands there. She’s not quite sure why she’s come. Maybe she’s still asleep. “Okay,” she says. “Good night.” She starts back to her bedroom.
    “Mom?”
    Irene turns around.
    “Is something wrong?”
    “No. Well, yes. I was going to tell you at dinner, but we got off on rock climbing. I’ve … Don and I are not going to be seeing each other anymore.”
    “Oh. I’m sorry. Should I be sorry?”
    “You mean, was it his idea?”
    “Well, yeah. Was it?”
    Irene leans against the doorjamb, crosses her arms. “Yes, it was. Uh-huh.”
    “But … Why?” Sadie asks. “Do you want to tell me why?”
    “I don’t know, really. He said he was getting back with his wife. But also I think it was that he just wasn’t that attracted to me. So, when you came home, I’d just asked Valerie … I just wanted her to give me an objective opinion of my body.”
    Sadie looks down.
    “I know you must have felt like … Anyway, that’s what it was. I’m sorry you had to walk in on it.”
    “It’s okay.”
    “So how’s Meghan?”
    “Good.”
    Irene stands there, smiling. She looks around Sadie’s room, at the poster of Paolo Nutini taped to her wall, the many photographsof her friends. On her dresser is a book that both John and Irene used to read to Sadie when she was a little girl; it was her favorite one. It’s called Paper Boats , and it’s a poem by an Indian writer named Rabindranath Tagore, about a little boy who writes his name and where he lives on paper boats to float down the stream, hoping that someone will find them and know who he is. Sadie sees her mother looking at the book and says, playfully, “Want me to read you a story?” and Irene says, “Not that one.”
    After she goes back to bed, she lies awake for a while, remembering how John used to read aloud to her, and she to him. It was in bed, most times, but occasionally they would do it in the living room, on the sofa, sitting side by side in their stocking feet. What a lovely thing that was. How safe it seemed, how sweet an offering. She still has never done that with anyone else. A guy she dated a couple of times asked, once. He pulled a book off his shelf and said, “Let me read something to you.”
    “May I?” Irene said and took the book from his hands. “Show me the passage. I’d rather read it myself.”

6
    S adie waits until she hears her mother close the door to her own bedroom. She counts to one hundred, slowly. Then she calls Ron. “Hey,” she says. “Are you asleep?”
    “Nah. Hi. What are you doing?”
    She turns onto her side, pulls the quilt up over her head. “Nothing. Just thinking of you.”
    “What a coincidence.”
    “Six more days till Saturday,” she says.
    “A little over a hundred and thirty hours.”
    “That makes it seem longer.”
    “You still feel okay about it, right?”
    “Yeah.” Mostly, she does. She doesn’t like lying to her parents. But neither would ever let her go away