Cures for Heartbreak Read Online Free

whirring down our street, a fire engine squealing in the distance. I stayed awake for a long time, counting the spots on the ceiling where the paint had peeled off. After a while I got up and went into my parents’ room.
    My sister was already there. My father snored on my mother’s old side of the bed; my sister slept in my father’s spot.
    I poked her. “Move over.” She grumbled unintelligibly and moved over an inch. I poked her again. She groaned and moved farther. I squeezed into the little slice of mattress, nudging her over, pulling the old flowered comforter up beneath my chin. I stared at the shadows on the ceiling that I’d stared at my whole life.
    If she dies, I’ll die. But here we were.

WORLD HISTORY
    History . . . isn’t simply what has happened. It’s a judgment on what has happened.
    â€”Cynthia Ozick
    Trust                

F our days after the funeral, my father decided that Alex and I should go back to school. I was reading in bed when he knocked on my door, peered into my room, and repeated, as he’d been doing at regular intervals, like a public service announcement, that we needed to go back to the way things were before. On Monday he’d reopen his shoe repair shop, I’d return to the ninth grade, and Alex to the twelfth. Things had to go back to normal.
    I stared up at him from my Anne of Green Gables. I was entranced by every orphan book I could find— Heidi, Oliver Twist, The Secret Garden —like they were company. The stream of visitors had petered out to just a few neighbors and the occasional oddity, such as Melody Bly, a religious girl in my class who had come in bearing a card signed by our homeroom and history teacher, Mr. Flag, and thirty-one classmates. The card had a huge gold cross on the front; at first glance I thought it was a plus sign. I’d barely ever spoken to Melody; she gave me a book called The Five Stages of Grief, filled with hazy photographs of silhouettes gazing out windows. I’dstuck it on the kitchen table on top of all the other cards we’d received, with their wispy watercolor flowers, sunrises, beach scenes, and vague quotes in curlicue scripts.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Though a tree may lose its limb, new boughs will grow and shade the empty space.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Grieve but a day—spend your lifetime celebrating the love you shared.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Love . . . bright as sunshine.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Loss . . . large as the ocean deep.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Time . . . will heal your heartbreak.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Memories . . . will bring you peace.
    â€œI got peanut butter,” my father said. He hovered in the doorway and gazed at me in my twin bed. “I’ll make your lunch for tomorrow.” He never made my lunch; I made it myself. And he rarely came into my room. Though I’d hardly changed anything since I was ten, he looked around it now like he was seeing it for the first time: the mobile of satiny stars above my door; my shelf of Barbies, scantily clad in bikinis made from old tights; a poster of Rob Lowe with lipstick marks on his bare chest; the menagerie of stuffed animals I’d loved all my life, their fur matted, faces flat as pancakes from years of being slept on. In a sudden wash of maturity twoyears ago I’d put them all in the closet, but in the last couple of weeks I’d taken them out and stationed them around my bed, like a plush army.
    My father’s eyes focused on a shelf by the window. A yahrzeit candle stood beside the Barbies. When Manny Musico had offered the candle to us my father had refused it, but as we were leaving I’d asked if I could have it. I hadn’t known what a yahrzeit candle was, but I’d wanted it. I’d taken everything Manny offered us—the Schwartz Memorial Chapel stationery, the