Gratitude Read Online Free

walked to the bakery, just a couple of doors down from the haberdashery.
    One of the people Lili hoped might have escaped notice was Aurel Deutsch. When Lili was fourteen and Aurel twelve, Aurel had seemed to develop a crush on her. He was tall and strong for a young boy, likely from working in his parents’ bakery and from sampling its wares, but Aurel puffed himself up even more when he saw Lili come in. He would have a small square of her favourite pastry, flodni , wrapped and waiting for her, compliments of the proprietor. Flodni was a three-storey pastry, with a layer of grated apple on top, poppyseed in the middle and sweet ground walnuts on the bottom. She never once had to pay for this delicious morsel and always ate it before she got home so she wouldn’t have to explain or share. Even if she’d wanted to, how could Lili have hoped to share the little delicacy among eight Bandels?
    Besides, Aurel wanted to see her eat it and would follow her out to the stoop, holding the bread she’d come for in the first place so that he could watch her enjoy the sweet. Lili felt his eyes on her, worried he’d get carried away. He watched her as though she were the sweet and he the taster. She found herself sometimes having to gobble her flodni , saying, “Please don’t feel you have to do this for me. Please, it would be better if you didn’t.”
    His answer was: “We should move to Budapest or Paris, you and I, and open a bakery, or a beautiful patisserie, and we could have you out front to draw in the patrons and me in the back up to my elbows in flour.” He was covered in flour now as he spoke to her, a boy of twelve, rushing ahead of his age.
    Lili sent Tildy in after that, but Tildy reported that Aurel didn’t care for her. “He hardly notices me,” Tildy said.
    “Does he give you anything?” Lili asked.
    “Like what?”
    “Nothing, never mind.”
    And now at thirteen, Aurel was a giant beside his parents, powerful and grown up, his bar mitzvah under his belt.
    But he was nowhere to be found at the bakery. Lili couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the cake display in search of flodni , but found none. She selected a few buns, ate one hurriedly, placed a coin on the counter and ran out.
    And where was her friend Hilda? Lili couldn’t even fathom it, how anyone would have— could have—made off with her dearest friend. Lili’s father delivered Hilda as Lili, a one-month-old, cried in an adjoining bed. There had been no other way. Mrs. Blauman had showed up at the Bandels’ door already “flooding the stoop,” as David told it. Those waters were the elixir of life, he often said, where twenty digits sprouted out of hands and feet and where a warm and serene world made everything possible.
    At school, Hilda often spoke to Lili about leaving Tolgy for the city and insisted Lili had to go with her. Even if Lili married and went away, Hilda would come with her and find someone to marry, too.
    Lili approached Hilda’s house with the greatest of dread. She didn’t want to look in. She wanted to take away the faint hope that it was not empty. But she did. She walked in, called out Hilda’s name, saw an envelope and glasses on the table as well as a blue hair ribbon, but then left.
    Lili wanted to search one final place. When she was younger, ten at most, her mother used to take her to a field cut sharply by a precipice in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. It was a cool and even frightening place but the most beautiful Lili had ever seen. And it was the last place her mother might have tried to hide. In fact, in the two hours it took her to get there, the idea grew in Lili’s mind that it was precisely where they’d gone, so she walked quickly and eagerly. She felt foolish in her wedding gown, but who was there to see her? Tildy had wanted desperately to try on the gown that morning, so now she could. Lili would meet her in the field with their mother, and Lili could swap clothes with her sister