Shaindele glanced at him, shot through with the shocking realization of how much he looked like his son. He had Duvie’s large, arrogant, widely spaced eyes. Even his face, gone slack and jowly through overindulgence and weakness, still held a hint of his son’s handsome high cheekbones. This is how Duvie will look in twenty-five years, with or without a beard and tzitzis and a yarmulke. He’ll be a weak man who loves his pleasures, and he will never have his fill of them, she thought with surprising insight. Staying religious wouldn’t make him a better man, just one with different vices. Anything spiritual in such men would always be just a light first coat slapped on a ruined, distempered wall full of cracks waiting to show themselves.

Then he caught her eye for a moment, and a look passed between them that sent a chill up her spine. Was it an appraisal? Was it a sensual, older man looking at a young girl, imagining her body beneath her clothes? Was that even possible? She shivered, lowering her eyes quickly and staring at the floor.

Leah reached over and squeezed her limp white hand, surprised that despite Shaindele’s outer show of complete indifference, it was trembling. Shaindele didn’t let go.

“We all know why we are here,” Rabbi Halpern began.

“Not really,” Yaakov countered. Why should he give an inch?

Rabbi Halpern cleared his throat. This obviously wasn’t going as he had expected. “Your daughter’s behavior. Let me be frank, if she were anyone else but Fruma Esther’s granddaughter, she would have been thrown out of our school long ago.”

“And why is that, Rav Halpern?” Yaakov said mildly, raising his brows.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s been going on!”

“I think your family is more to blame for that than my innocent young daughter!”

Rabbi Halpern leaned back. “HaShem Yishmor. My family?”

“Yes, your son. Your Duvie. Don’t you pretend we don’t know everything.”

Rabbi Halpern sighed heavily with a show of saintly patience, as if greatly put upon without justification. “Yes. With my son. My Duvie. But if not him, it would have been someone else.”

Yaakov slammed a fist into his open palm. “That is mamash a farshtunkene chutzpah! You sit behind that desk, you think you’re so important you’re potur? Your son took that job in the pizza place to meet girls, girls from your school. My innocent young daughter is not the only girl he started up with. You think you’re the only one with informants?”

Like chalk from a blackboard, the arrogant certainty was suddenly erased from Rabbi Halpern’s face, Leah saw with a mixture of satisfaction and fright. She could not believe Yaakov was behaving like this! It was thrilling.

“You knew he was a danger to the community, yet you sheltered him instead of sending him away.”