She was definitely the tzadeikes of the family. Who would’ve thought?

Ariella: Why is my daughter being punished when she is such a tzadeikes?

Shoshana: I don’t want to hurt Avigail, but I can’t put her in the class with her friends

Ariella

I told Brenda Marcus I would be on vacation this week. I’m sure I did.

So why was she calling me now?

I let the call go to voicemail, knowing Brenda was likely to message instantly after. Sure enough, half a minute later, my phone buzzed. Oh, no, a voice note.

I pressed play.

Ariella, hi, it’s me. Listen, I know you’re on vacation or something, but we have an emergency with the window shades. They arrived, and they’re a few inches too short, the whole look is wrong…. I don’t want to leave this until you get back. I think we need to contact the company right away, otherwise…

I hit stop halfway through. Window shades, please! This was not an emergency. Besides….

Inspiration hit. I tapped my work email, did a quick search, and yessss here it was. Confirmation from the window shade company. The delivery wasn’t expected until next week. And yesterday, I’d had a confirmation from the other company….

These were the study window shades. And Brenda had assumed they were for the dining room — they were almost identical, after all — and had them installed in the wrong room….

I glanced around; the girls were all occupied. Tamara was watching something on her phone, Yaeli was doing her hair in her room, Dina hadn’t yet surfaced. And Avigail….

Movement from out on the deck caught my eye. Oh, right, Avigail was out there, davening. She’d been outside for a while already. Maybe she was doing the daily Tehillim that she’d taken on a while back?

Either way, none of the girls would mind if I took a few minutes to handle the Marcus emergency.

“Hi, Brenda. The shades that were delivered yesterday were for the study windows, not the dining room. I think we ordered those slightly shorter. When I get home, we’ll have them switched. We’ll be in touch next week.”

Hopefully, that would keep her at bay until our mini-vacation was over.

It had been Tamara’s idea. It was her first year working in the summer and, in her words, it was “sooo depressing.”

I’d suggested that she take off a few days and do a mini-vacation, maybe with friends, but that hadn’t panned out. Some of her friends were studying or teaching; they had the whole summer off anyway. Others couldn’t take off work the same week as she could….

That’s when she’d come up with the idea of a girls’ getaway.