Chapter 6

The snow came Friday.

Not a storm — just the first real snow of December, soft and unhurried, settling on the streets of Crown Heights by late afternoon and muffling the neighborhood into something quieter than itself. Joshua drove across the bridge with Rebekah’s two suitcases in the trunk, already moved to the Park Slope apartment earlier that morning, and thought that if you were going to get married in a synagogue in Brooklyn in winter, this was the kind of evening for it.

The synagogue was the one Zack had belonged to — Rabbi Menachem’s congregation on Eastern Parkway, the same building where they had buried him six weeks ago. Joshua had wondered, briefly, whether it was right to hold the wedding there, whether it would feel too close to the grief. But Rebekah had said, when he asked, that she thought Zack would have wanted it. That using the same space for a beginning as they had used for an ending was not a contradiction but a kind of wholeness. He had thought about that for a day and decided she was right.

The families arrived separately and came together in the small vestibule — Abraham and Deborah Lowenstein, Abraham already in his good suit with his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes doing something he was working hard to control; Sarah Libowitz in the best dress she owned, clutching a small evening bag and looking at Joshua with an expression of such unguarded gratitude that he had to look away. A handful of relatives filled out the rows — aunts, cousins, an elderly uncle of Zack’s from the community who had known the family for thirty years.

Rebekah came out of the side room where she had been preparing with her mother and two of the women from the congregation who had volunteered to help.

Joshua had seen her in her dark coat and her sheitel and her housedress and her careful good clothes for the courthouse. He had not seen her like this.

She wore a simple white dress, long-sleeved and high-necked, modest in the way Hasidic tradition required but cut well enough that it showed the slender line of her — five foot five, slight through the shoulders, the diamond on her hand catching the candlelight as she walked. The sheitel was gone. In its place was a white lace veil over her natural hair, dark and thick and falling past her shoulders, the first time he had seen it. It changed her face. She looked older and younger at the same time, more herself than he had seen her, and she was walking toward him with her eyes on his and something in her expression that was not performance and not composure but simply the real thing — a young woman walking toward her life.