Chapter 2

He told himself the first visit was practical.

Rebekah had moved back to her mother’s apartment on Kingston Avenue — a third-floor walkup above a kosher bakery, two bedrooms, the kind of place that had been functional once and was now just small. Sarah Libowitz had lived there alone since her husband’s death six years ago, and the apartment had taken on the particular stillness of a woman who had stopped expecting company. Joshua showed up on a Tuesday afternoon ten days after the funeral with two bags of groceries because it seemed like a thing to do, a gesture that carried no weight and required no explanation.

Rebekah answered the door in a housedress, the sheitel on, a dish towel over her shoulder. She looked at the grocery bags and then at him.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“I know.” He lifted the bags slightly. “Can I come in?”

Her mother was at a neighbor’s. The apartment was quiet, afternoon light coming through curtains that were slightly too heavy for the windows. He set the bags on the kitchen counter and she began putting things away without asking where he’d gotten them or what he’d spent. She had that quality — he was noticing it again — of receiving what was offered without making it complicated.

“Stay for lunch,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.

He stayed.

She made a soup from things that had apparently already been in the refrigerator, moving around the small kitchen with an ease that told him this was where she was most herself. Not performing. Not anxious. Just cooking. The smell filled the apartment inside of ten minutes and Joshua sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and watched her and thought that his brother had eaten well, at least.

They talked about Zack.

Carefully at first. The way you handle something fragile in bad light. Joshua told her about the Passover seder where eight-year-old Zack had corrected their father’s pronunciation three times and Abraham had finally sent him from the table, the whole family laughing about it for years afterward. Rebekah smiled at that — a real smile, the first genuine one he’d seen from her — and it changed her face considerably. There was warmth underneath the composure, something alive and a little wry.

“He corrected my Hebrew once,” she said. “The first week we were married. Very quietly, very gently, as though he was doing me a favor.”

“Was he right?”

“Of course he was right.” She set a bowl in front of him. “He was always right. He found that very important.”

Joshua laughed. It surprised him — the laugh, and the fact that it felt genuine. She sat across from him with her own bowl and they ate, and for a few minutes the grief in the room stepped back slightly and let them be two people having lunch.

He asked about her days. She described them without complaint, which somehow made them sound lonelier than complaint would have. She woke early and davened with her mother — the women’s prayers, quiet and brief. She cooked. She cleaned. She read, mostly religious texts because those were what filled the apartment’s single bookshelf, though she admitted she had been working through a novel her cousin had left behind months ago, a little guiltily, a few pages at a time. She did not go out much. The neighborhood was familiar but the familiarity had changed shape since the wedding — she had moved through these streets as Zack’s wife and now she moved through them as his widow and people looked at her differently, carefully, as though grief might be something they could catch.