From birth, she had lived in a walled city on a planet in which all the paths had been clearly delineated, the rules made crystal clear. And behind those battlements, she had been happy with those childish amusements that had been permitted her, never feeling any sense of deprivation. But the encounter with Leah, coupled as it was with the loss of her mother, had made it shockingly clear that those walls were not in fact made of bricks and mortar. If you pushed against them, they gave way immediately, opening up a road toward a million unexplored possibilities.

Looking beyond them to see where her stepmother had come from, trying to imagine the life she had lived, had begun as an exercise in contempt to strengthen her opposition to a match of which, she told herself, no one approved; an attempt to strengthen her solidarity with those respectable and wise people around her who had so clearly communicated their disgust and rejection.

“Baalas teshuva with the wild red hair,” Freidel had called Leah, egging Shaindele on to do things that almost destroyed her relationship with her father simply to placate what she now realized were an ignorant and hateful girl’s ugly prejudices. Why, she’d even been ready to run away from home and get married, convinced that Leah would destroy her family’s reputation, reducing her own value in the marriage market to little more than zero!

Had she really been that silly, she wondered, that self-absorbed and vengeful she’d been prepared to destroy the happiness of her family simply to assuage some worthless acquaintance’s sense of propriety? She shook her head in self-amazement, thinking of the home she had come from that morning. The smell of coffee and orange juice had filled the clean, orderly kitchen, and folded laundry sat in baskets waiting to be put away. Chasya and Mordechai Shalom, both beautifully dressed, their little faces scrubbed, their hair combed, sat chattering amiably over a table of freshly made omelets and toast. Most of all, she recalled her father’s newly serene eyes as he’d sat back watching, a gentle smile on his lips.

It was his last week in kollel. What a relief it probably was to him to know that when he started work full-time in the city, his home and his children would be in competent, loving hands, not those of some silly, resentful teenager who couldn’t cope, she thought with surprising candor, both surprised and pleased at how much she had grown to finally admit such a thing. She looked down gratefully at the blouse she wore, newly laundered and ironed by her stepmother, and the brown lunch bag filled with nonfattening, nutritious treats Leah carefully prepared for her each day.