“Or my head, or my liver, or my varicose veins,” she muttered. “But what am I going to do? My Shaindele says he touched her. That the man touched her, took the pins out of her hair and talked to her in a way that is not tzniusdik! Think of it, Basha. A fifty-year-old, with grandchildren!”

Basha tilted her head, giving her friend a long, sideways look.

“All right. I know my granddaughter doesn’t always tell the exact truth, but my Yaakov looked into it. The man counsels young girls in an office with no windows, locked at both ends! With his own eyes, Yaakov saw another young girl coming out of there crying. Besides, why should Shaindele make it up?”

Basha considered this for a few moments, then shook her head. “You’re right, Fruma Esther. She’s a bit tsumisht, but she is a good girl. I’m proud on her that she told her parents and didn’t go back.”

“But it’s a serious problem, Basha. This counselor, this Grub—”

“Such a name!”

“Right? Who has a name like that and doesn’t change it? Anyway, Grub is very good friends with the Bobelger Rebbe.”

“Oy vey! You can’t start with him. His Hasidim are animals. They’re dangerous.”

“Not all,” Fruma Esther remonstrated mildly, with a distinct absence of the passion she reserved for good causes that she actually believed in. Both women, longtime residents of Boro Park, had watched with growing alarm and resentment as over the years Hasidim of various sects had displaced the longtime Litvish misnagdim from their homes and institutions, buying up everything in sight, causing a stampede of the older residents from Boro Park to places like Lakewood and Monsey.

“But Halpern, her principal, isn’t a Hasid and Bais Yaakov isn’t a Hasidishe school. Why would he send girls to a Bobelger Hasid for counseling? And why would he side with him?”

“I think that there are very few frum psychologists for girls in Boro Park, and he’s sent so many girls to Grub that if it comes out something is wrong, it will be a shandah for him personally. So he’s threatening to throw Shaindele out if she doesn’t go back.”

“Remind me what you told me about why she was sent there in the first place? I’m so forgetful.”

“I never told you.”

“So tell me now.”

She hesitated.

“I’m listening.”

“Shaindele was going out with Duvie, Halpern’s son.”

“The one that’s OTD? The one from the pizza parlor? I didn’t know she already started with a shadchan.”

Fruma Esther sighed. “She isn’t. She did it on her own. Behind her parents’ backs.”