"If the kids want to come down, they come down for a Shabbos, if they don’t, they don’t. This is not about them"

N

echama Stagler watched the precision of the Erev Shabbos parade, as she called it in her mind, and wondered why it was making her feel upset.

There was a line of cars waiting at the booth at the entrance to Alameda Gardens, Odysseys and Siennas waiting to get in, vans that would turn right and left and wind around the development to send scores of happy eineklach running into the homes of waiting bubbies and zeidies. It happened every Friday, one of the unwritten Lakewood customs that everyone seemed to know about, even though it wasn’t written anywhere and was never expressed, that the local eineklach would come every week to say “Gut Shabbos.”

But as Rina Putterman liked to joke, “saying Gut Shabbos” meant a four-course to’ameha party and then being sent off with a few bags of nosh, maybe hot challos and a kugel too. Rina was good-natured about it, but she loved living in Lakewood, so to her it was a big joke. All part of the charm.

It helped to have endless money, Nechama thought. Rina didn’t actually have access to her son-in-law’s money, but she had that rich person E-ZPass, as Nechama called it — also in her mind, she had once expressed it to Reuven, and he grimaced, as if it was beneath her to say it — and so Rina never had to pay for things. She had the discount at Full-On Fashion because her son-in-law owned the building; the guy at Lunch Spa waved away the suggestion of paying, since he catered all of Shea’s business lunches; and, even if she herself didn’t realize it, the schools were lining up to hire her husband only as a way of getting on the son-in-law’s radar. Of course Lakewood worked for Rina.