Her voice grew sharper, even as the tantalizing smell of fresh-perked coffee filled the room. “Oh, but Abe, please, not Grossinger’s”
Abe rushed into the kitchen clutching an ivory-colored, embossed envelope. His face radiated excitement. “Look, Hon, can you believe it? Twenty years! The guys are planning a reunion to mark it.”
Mutty looked up from the New York Times, where he’d been working furiously on the crossword puzzle. “Twenty years since what?”
“D-Day, Mutt,” Abe answered, “when your dad and tens of thousands of other soldiers like me landed on Normandy Beach. June 6, ’44, I’ll never forget that date, that day, that night.” For a moment his eyes clouded, and it seemed that he’d moved very far away from this peaceful Boro Park kitchen, to a land of shrieking missiles, flashing tracers, a place of bombs and blood and hundreds of parachuting figures swaying gracefully into Gehinnom.
A handwritten note fluttered out of the invitation. “And look at this, Annie! Charly Wagner writes to tell me that though the actual date, June 6, comes out on Shabbos, the men in the company knew I couldn’t make it and so they scheduled it for Sunday instead. And in a kosher hotel!”
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