The Devil's Arithmetic

"I'm tired of remembering," Hannah said to her mother as she climbed into the car. She was flushed with April sun and her mouth felt sticky from jelly beans and Easter candy.
"You know it's Passover," her mother said, sighing, in a voice deliberately low. She kept smiling so that no one at Rosemary's house would know they were arguing.
"I didn't know."
"Of course you knew."
"Then I forgot." Hannah could hear her voice beginning to rise into a whine she couldn't control.
"How could you forget, Hannah. Especially this year, when Passover falls on the same day as Easter? We've talked and talked about it. First we've got to go home and change. Then we're going to Grandpa Will and Grandma Belle's for the first night's Seder."
"I'm not hungry. I ate a big dinner at Rosemary's. And I don't want to go to the Seder. Aaron and I will be the only kids there and everyone will say how much we've grown even though they just saw us last month. And, besides, the punch lines of all the jokes will be in Yiddish." When her mother didn't answer at once, Hannah slumped down in the seat. Sometimes she wished her mother would yell at her the way Rosemary's mother did, but she knew her mother would only give her one of those slow, low, reasonable lectures that were so annoying.
"Passover isn't about eating, Hannah," her mother began at last, sighing and pushing her fingers up through her silver-streaked hair.
"You could've fooled me," Hannah muttered.
"It's all about remembering."
"All Jewish holidays are about remembering, Mama. I'm tired of remembering."
"Tired or not, you're going with us, young lady. Grandpa Will and Grandma Belle are expecting the entire family, and that means you, too. You have to remember how much family means to them. Grandma lost her parents to the Nazis before she and her brother managed to escape. And Grandpa..."
"I remember. I remember...," Hannah whispered.
"...Will lost everyone but your Aunt Eva. A family of eight all but wiped out." She sighed again but Hannah suspected there was a little sympathy in that sigh. It was more like punctuation. Instead of putting periods at the end of sentences, her mother sighed.
Hannah rolled her eyes up and slipped farther down in the seat. Her stomach felt heavy, as if the argument lay there like unleavened bread.

It wasn't a particularly long trip from New Rochelle to the Bronx, where her grandparents lived, but the car was overheated as usual and Aaron complained the entire way.
"I'm sick," he said loudly. Whenever he was unhappy or scared, his voice got louder. If he was really sick, he could barely be heard. "I'm going to throw up. We have to go back."
As her mother turned around and glared at them from the front seat, Hannah patted Aaron's hand and whispered, "Don't be such a baby, Ron-ron. The Four Questions aren't that hard."
"I can't remember all four questions." Aaron almost shouted the last word.
"You don't have to read them." Hannah's patience was wearing thin. "You're supposed to read them. From the Haggadah."
"What if I can't read it right?"
Hannah began to sigh, caught herself, and turned it into a cough. "You've been reading right since you were three, Mr. Smarty." She cuffed him lightly on the side of the head and he cried out.
"Hannah!" her father called back in warning.
"Look," she said quickly to Aaron to shut him up, "it doesn't matter if you make a mistake, Ron-ron, but if you do, I'll be right there next to you. I'll whisper it into your ear just like they do in plays when someone forgets a line."
"Like Mrs. Grahame had to do when you forgot..."
"Just like that."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
She gave him a funny look and then pounced on him, tickling him under the arms and over his belly. When he tried to escape by turning his back on her, she got him again from behind. His laughter rose higher and higher until he almost did throw up.
"Hannah!" her father said again and her mother stared at them to fiercely over the seat that they drew themselves into opposite corners, staring out their windows with expressions of injured innocence.
A few miles farther on, Aaron begged, "Tell me a story, Hannah, please. Please. Please."
"For God's sake, tell him a story," her father said, pounding his right hand against the steering wheel. Driving in city traffic always made him cranky.
Glad to be doing something she knew she was good at, Hannah began a gruesome tale about the walking dead, borrowing most of the characters, plot, and sound effects from a movie she'd seen on television the night before. Aaron was fascinated by it. The zombies had just marched into the hero's house and eaten his mother when they arrived at the apartment house complex.
While their father parked the car, Hannah and Aaron raced into the building. Because he was the youngest, Aaron got to press the elevator button.
"That's not fair..." Hannah began. But then she remembered how scared she'd been the first time she'd had to ask The Four Questions at the Seder and she stopped. Instead she reached out and held his hand tightly as the elevator rose to the ninth floor in one great swoop.

"Hannahleh, how much you've grown," Aunt Rose said. "Twelve years old and already a beautiful young lady."
Hannah smiled and pulled away as soon as she could.
"Thirteen," she said. It was almost true. She didn't ask Aunt Rose how anyone could be beautiful with mouse-brown hair and braces on her teeth. Aunt Rose thought everyone in the family was the most beautiful, the smartest, the greatest, even if it wasn't true.
Escaping Aunt Rose's attentions by going into the bathroom, Hannah looked at herself in the mirror. There was a lipstick stain where Aunt Eva had kissed her on the forehead. She ran some water and tried to scrub it off, feeling guilty because Aunt Eva was her favorite aunt, the only one who preferred her over Aaron. Hannah was even named after some friend of Aunt Eva's. Some dead friend. The lipstick wouldn't come off completely. Brushing her bangs to hide the mark, Hannah left the bathroom worried that someone else might be lying in wait for her, and dreading it.