A great weight lifted from her heart. She couldn’t believe he was saying everything she had wanted to say but was afraid to because it might make him doubt the sincerity of her transition from a girl who picked up men in bars and saw forbidden movies to a devout Boro Park wife and mother, a member in good standing in their community, the woman she thought he wanted her to be. It was as if someone had turned a key, opening the padlocks on both their hearts and bodies.

What happened next was thrilling, astonishing, tender, exciting, and surprising to them both, leaving them exhausted, battered by wave after wave of emotion so deep and real it was almost destructive, changing them both in fundamental ways that only much later would they fully comprehend.

Blessed are You, Eternal God, Source of Life, who has kept us in life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this joyous moment.

They were one now, Leah thought, truly. Pray God that would never change.

4

SHAINDELE’S NEW BEGINNING

What a difference a year had made, Shaindele thought, settling into the familiar, rickety wooden chair with its long, scuffed writing arm, junked from some New York public school that had long since modernized to plastic. In that the furniture mirrored the building, an old public school whose Irish and Italian second-generation tenants had long since disappeared, replaced by Hasidic Jews who had bought the abandoned building, outfitting it with scraps and leftovers and their own version of an education, which would have scandalized their American-born predecessors.

She was seventeen, going on eighteen. Long gone was the dread of running into the likes of Freidel Halpern, the principal’s perfect daughter, who had graduated months before, taking her perfect French braid, her snobbery, and her ugly insinuations with her. Gone, too, was Gnendel, her sidekick and echo, who had left without graduating to marry the son of one of the area’s butchers. With glee, Shaindele imagined her in a stained white apron standing behind the counter.

Although one was forbidden to hold grudges, she would never forgive those two who had orchestrated and led the vicious bullying she had suffered in wake of her mother’s death: the little hints about how early death was a punishment for sins and the high-handed disdain over her father’s relationship with a baalas teshuva. How they had made her suffer! She wondered if the recent wedding was going to put an end to it or, as she most dreaded, become the jumping-off point for yet another round?

But so far, the girls had been kind about her father’s new wife.

“Such a beautiful wedding, kaynahora,” little Esther Shulman had whispered sincerely. “May your family know only joy from now on.”