“This is not like you, Fruma Esther.” Basha shook her head.

“You should only know what’s like me these days, Basha. But I don’t know what to do. My sins overwhelm me,” she murmured sadly.

“Sins? What sins, Fruma Esther?” the other woman scoffed, a small ironic smile twisting her kind face into one of surprise and skepticism. “If your sins are sitting so heavy on you, what should the rest of us say? You are the most pious person I know.”

Fruma Esther—longing to abandon herself completely to the joyous comfort of complete self-recrimination and disgust, feelings that demand nothing but shame, which she could supply in abundance—was flattered. “I have always tried, Basha. My whole life. With my whole heart.”

“Not a question even.” Her friend shook her head, scandalized. “We have all looked up to you, Fruma Esther. Believe me. You gave strength to so many. Just to see how you handled your nesyonos gave everyone chizuk. How you behaved when you lost your beloved Yitzhak Chaim, may his soul rest in peace! Like a queen, your head up, taking care of your family, comforting all the mourners, feeding all the yeshiva boys who came to recite the kaddish by you … What? How many were there? Twenty? Thirty?”

“Seventy, one Shabbos alone! Oy, did I cook!” She sighed. “My dear husband … Cherish your Aryeh, Basha. Every moment you are together. To be a widow is to be half-alive. The loneliness…”

“I don’t know why you never thought to remarry. You were young when you lost him.”

“Young?” she scoffed. “I was sixty-three, already a grandmother many times over.”

“Until a hundred and twenty!” Basha blessed her friend. “If you had only listened to the matchmakers then. There was Rav Eichenstein, who lost his Peninnah just a few months later.”

“I was still in mourning! It was out of the question.”

“And then there was that Admor of Chemnitz, whose wife was in that car accident, nebbech.”

“A hit-and-run, God should wreak a terrible revenge on the rosha who left her there! But what would I have done among the Hasidim?” She chuckled, finding the very image of walking side by side with some man in a big fur shtreimel and a long, black bekesha so fantastic as to be irresistibly amusing even in her present mood.

“It’s not unheard of. Remember when Rebbitzen Erlich went off to B’nai Brak to marry the head of the Mezhbizh?”

“Her children were shocked.”

Basha nodded. “It was a surprise. To everyone. But so what? I heard from my cousin Malka who saw her at a tisch just last month that she’s very happy. Wears a big turban instead of a wig. The Mezhbizh don’t wear wigs.”

The two women looked at each other and couldn’t help laughing. “Imagine! A turban! Well, if it was too late for me then, it’s certainly too late for me now.” Fruma Esther shrugged.