Finkelbein. From London, the girls would take a bus to Turkey and start out on the Overland Route, trekking into India and Nepal. Sarah had refused to let Jo travel to Washington for the Freedom March. (“It won’t be safe,” Sarah had sniffed, “and if you think I’m in a position to help you buy your schoolbooks because you decided not to work all summer, you can think again.”) Jo had never forgiven Sarah for keeping her from being there on that momentous day. She’d spent her senior year begging and pleading and finally announcing that she was over twenty-one, technically an adult, and that she could get a passport and go wherever she wanted to go, with or without Sarah’s permission. Sarah did not approve of Shelley Finkelbein, or of Jo’s planned trip—“Why would you want to spend your money to go to countries where the people are so poor that they’d do anything to come over here?” she’d asked. But Jo had pestered and persisted and even cried, and eventually Sarah had grudgingly given her permission, announcing that at least India was better than going to organize down South and getting herself arrested, or even killed.
“And these classes are . . .” Sarah peered at Bethie and groped for the terminology. “Requirements for your major?”
“Part of the core curriculum,” Bethie said, knowing her mother might not even know what a curriculum was, or how the word “core” might apply to it. She felt bad about lying to Sarah, who had dropped out of school after tenth grade in the midst of the Depression. But if Bethie’s choices were a summer in Ann Arbor, having adventures with her friends, or three months in Detroit, sleeping in her girlhood bedroom, having dinner every night with her mother in this sad, dark kitchen, and selling ties or silverware all day long at Hudson’s, Bethie would lie, and probably also cheat and steal to make sure she got to leave.
“Where will you stay?”
“I rented a room in an off-campus apartment in a house where some of my friends already live.” Bethie waited for her mother to start probing—which friends? Off-campus where? How will you be paying for this? But all Sarah did was sigh.
“I should be used to it by now.” Sarah’s mouth folded itself into a tight-lipped frown as she used a silver letter opener to slit the throat of the envelope holding the gas bill. “Jo stopped coming home for the summers, and now you won’t, either.”
“It’s easier to find jobs in Ann Arbor,” Bethie said.
“Hudson’s is always hiring,” Sarah replied. Bethie could see strands of gray in her mother’s dark-brown hair as Sarah bent over the checkbook at the table that still had four chairs around it. Her mom reminded her of a rubber band that had been snapped so many times until all of its resilience was used up, and it just hung there, stretched out and useless and limp. Those fights with Jo had been the animating force of Sarah’s life. The back-and-forth of the battle had given her a reason to get up in the mornings. Anger and frustration and hope that she could turn Jo into someone else had powered her through her days, and had probably given her plenty of sleepless nights. Now that Jo was gone, and her husband was dead, and Bethie, too, was leaving, what did Sarah have to keep her going?
Bethie felt her heart give a sudden, painful twist. She had people. She had Devon, and Flip and Marjorie and Connie, and the rest of her friends. She had boys to dance with, boys to flirt with, boys who would loan her their copies of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Jo had Shelley, and their crowd of activists, Doug Brodesseur and Marian Leight and Valerie Moore, a stunning girl with high cheekbones and glossy dark skin whose Afro made her almost six feet tall and who, it was whispered, was a member of Detroit’s Black Panthers. Who did Sarah have? Bethie looked at the four chairs around the kitchen table, the scuff marks on the walls. There was a bare spot in the red linoleum in front of the sink, and it was probably the exact size of the space Sarah’s feet occupied when she stood there, washing dishes. The radio in its plastic case stood on the counter, probably still tuned to WKMH, the “Keener Thirteen-er,” the station her dad listened to when they’d broadcast