She looks at the display again, at something called the Assist-A-Tray, what the saleswoman had been trying to get her to buy. She considers the table near it.

Who knew there were so many options — for limitations?

A modern, ergonomically shaped, laminated teak table top, she reads.

The wood is orange. Like a school desk. Nothing homey about it.

The white Assist-A-Tray, or the ugly orange table?

Still the table. Functionality is what matters.

Aviva walks to the front of the store, along the length of the aisle, forcing herself to slow her steps. It feels like walking normally is showing off. She’s the youngest person in the store.

A man looking as lost as Aviva feels peers over a recliner, fingering fabrics like he’s not sure what he’s feeling for.

She passes an older couple, the woman easing into a specialized armchair, the husband pulling a lever as they laugh together. She scowls behind the box she’s carrying. Why are they making it look like it’s fun?

There are three women working the cash registers, all older than Mom. She gets it; you couldn’t have anyone young working in a store like this. Mom is the anomaly.

“Just the table?” the woman asks, ringing it up.

“Yes, for my mother,” Aviva says.

“Oh,” the woman says. Her expression is sympathy, the concerned tilt of her eyebrows.

“Will she be using this bedside or over a chair? Did you check the dimensions?”

Aviva shakes her head. “It looks fine,” she squeaks out. She’s tired, so done with this. She focuses on the kind brows, and it almost makes her tear up.

“You probably know this, but in case the situation with your mother is… um… new, there’s a wonderful organization that helps people in your community with this sort of thing. This woman, what’s her name, Ella? No — Elka, that’s what it is. She’s lovely. Would you like her number?

Aviva cringes at the your community, but even more at the name. Mrs. Elka Kirschenbaum from Ezra Verefuah, the one-stop chesed organization for their town. She knows her from way back when…. Noo. No thank you.

She nods stiffly at the woman. “It’s okay,” she says.

It comes out like a bark and she feels bad, and when the woman scrawls the number on the back of the receipt — she can’t not take it. But when she leaves the store, she shreds the receipt to pieces as she goes. She is so not going to call this number  — when she thinks about how much Mom overuses the chesed organizations, has done since back when Abba left, since Aviva can remember. There won’t be one extra phone call to Elka Kirschenbaum, not on her watch, anyway.

“Hey, where are you coming from? You look finished.”

Aviva doesn’t want to talk about the mobility store right now. “Just school. And thanks, Meira.”

“Supper, anyone?” Racheli looks up from the stove. “I made sauce from scratch.”

“You’re the best.”

Three woven placemats on the tables, real cutlery. Aviva takes a seat with the others.

Meira and Racheli have been here a few years longer than her. They have a system going, apartment-living down to a science, including a dinner rotation, chore allocations, and all the little touches that make this apartment feel like home. She’d fit right into the spot that opened up when their friend got married.

“Mmm.” Aviva inhales the rosé sauce atop noodles and salmon. “Go, Racheli.”

She feels the stress of the Big Apple Mobility trip flow off her, the warm sluggishness of good food, this space with her roommates, taking over. She’s always been good at demarcation lines, at keeping the chunks of her life separate. Abba. Mom. Hospital. School. Home.

“So, Daniel Reichberg….” Meira says.

Aviva pauses, holds out a forkful of food, her face a question.

“Yeah,” Meira says, “A friend of mine was asking about him, and I know you went out with him.”

“Meira, I’m eating now. Later.”

“You’re practically done. C’mon.”

She looks down at her plate. She’s done.

“More?” Racheli says sweetly, reaching for the serving spoon.

“Racheli, you’re gonna make some guy so happy one day.”

Racheli serves them all second helpings — even Meira, who’s always dieting. Aviva got to know her as the powerhouse who comes into school for the winter months to head the school play. Last winter, Aviva came on board to work on scenery for the play and became friendly with the great show coordinator — and learned there was a space available in her apartment. It had been around the time that Fiona joined the fray — and high time for her to move on and out.

Meira’s dark hair falls over intense eyes. She’s looking at Aviva now, waiting.

“Reichberg,” Aviva says. “So it was a good few months ago, almost a year now, just about when I moved in here. He was soft-spoken, really nice. Too nice. For me, anyway. ”

She looks up at the picture atop the couch in the living room; a yellow-pink river, pinker horizon, the outline of a sailboat. She’d painted it while they were dating; there is nothing like the intense focus on brushstroke and color to help her sort out her emotions.

She studies the landscape, thinks about the hundreds of tributaries that trickle into a river. Meira, Racheli,they are their own stories, their own rivers, all forming who they are today — eligible, waiting — a plan bigger than they keeping them here together in this little apartment in Brooklyn.

You could never know someone’s whole story, but she thinks sometimes about the murkiness of her own. What she’s coming from, and — dear G-d, the situation with Mom — where her river’s flowing now.

She’s still staring and Racheli says, “What?”

Aviva glances at Meira, who’s headed off to her room, and lowers her voice. “I painted that picture when I was going out with Reichberg,” she tells Racheli. “I guess it reminds me of that time.”

“You said it was a moving-in gift.”

“Well, it was, too.”

“I love that picture, the layering on it, the depth… It was why we took you in, you know.” Racheli winks.

Aviva twirls her fork near her forehead. You’re nuts.

Aviva grabs some dish soap and Racheli materializes at her side, puts the cutlery in the sink. “You sure the guy Meira mentioned wasn’t for you? I mean, look what he brought out in you.”

“It’s just a picture! Not exactly what I’d use to gauge compatibility.”

It was his goodness that had terrified her, she thinks as hot water runs over her hands. She couldn’t share ugly truths with him; he wouldn’t get it. And… he wasn’t Ari Storch.

“Also, I would’ve walked all over him,” she says aloud. But it’s just another joke to cover her vulnerability. Who knows what that sort of goodness could have done for her?

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 909)