Read Online Sweet Like Sugar by Wayne Hoffman - Free Book Online

leave cooler, drier air in their wake. Not Washington: The heat that oppressed everyone before the storm returns immediately after the last drops fall; the humidity gets even worse.
    When Rabbi Zuckerman knocked on my door, he was already wet after the short walk from his store, holding a newspaper over his head. “I didn’t bring my umbrella today,” he said.
    I grabbed mine and escorted him to the car. The rain was coming in sheets, and my windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. It was hard to see. Fortunately, we didn’t have far to go.
    When we pulled into his driveway, I turned off the car and got out so I could walk him to his front door.
    â€œThank you so much, Benji,” he said over the noise of the rain as he fumbled for his key. “Why don’t you come in for a moment?”
    â€œI really should—”
    â€œJust for a few minutes,” he interrupted. “This storm won’t last long. You might as well wait until it passes.”
    I glanced up at the sky, then went inside.
    Heavy off-white drapes were pulled over most of the windows and mustard-colored shag carpets lined the floors. The house was damp and suffocatingly warm, the air heavy with the scent of books and mildew. Bookshelves lined nearly every wall, in the living room on the right and the dining room on the left. Looking straight ahead up the carpeted steps, I could see more shelves in the upstairs hallway.
    â€œPlease, sit down, dry off for a moment,” said the rabbi, pointing to a lumpy wingback chair in the living room. “I’ll go get you a glass of water.” He walked toward the kitchen, in the back of the house, behind the staircase.
    I didn’t want to get his chair wet, but even more, I wanted to snoop. So I remained standing, checking out his living room.
    The furniture was old and well-worn: a three-seat sofa covered in golden brown velvet with a pair of needlepoint accent pillows, the wingback chair with its threadbare tweed upholstery, a glass oval coffee table with an empty cut-glass candy dish on top. I could tell that the rabbi always sat in the same spot, at one end of the sofa, within reach of the end table and the reading lamp’s pull chain; the seat cushion had a permanent indentation in that spot. There was no mess in the room—no stacks of old newspapers, no unopened junk mail, no dirty coffee mug left behind—but there was also a sense that the room hadn’t been cleaned properly in some time. Dusting, vacuuming, airing out the drapes. We could just as easily have been returning to the rabbi’s summer house after a long season away, finding the place frozen in suspended animation exactly as he’d left it six months earlier. But he’d been gone only since the morning.
    On the mantel over the fireplace, alongside an empty vase and a silver menorah, sat a couple of framed photos. One was an old black-and-white picture of a man and a woman, a professional eight-by-ten portrait in a tarnished metal frame that had small roses in the corners. The other was a more recent color snapshot, in a tacky orange ceramic frame that said “Greetings from Florida” and had a small green alligator in the bottom corner, opening his grinning mouth—souvenir alligators always grin—at the elderly couple in the photograph.
    I had the Florida picture in my hand when the rabbi came in with a glass of water. He had a can of mixed nuts in his other hand. He handed me the water and emptied the nuts into the candy dish.
    â€œThat’s my wife, Sophie, may she rest in peace,” he said. “She passed away last fall. That’s the last picture I have of the two of us together.”
    I hadn’t even recognized Rabbi Zuckerman. He looked at least a decade younger and he didn’t have his short gray beard; he must have grown it after she died.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said, putting the picture back on the mantel. Sorry that his wife was