She’d tried. Then one day, when the children were fighting and the phone was ringing and she was trying to prepare soup for dinner, she gritted her teeth and filled the soup pot directly from the faucet. While she still diligently checked over lettuce leaves and cauliflower, holding them up to the light; still poured rice and lentils out onto the table then carefully checked them grain by grain as she swept them into a container, her days of boycotting the Brooklyn municipal water pipes were over.

Strangely, she hardly felt any guilt. The only thing that bothered her was how she hadn’t had the courage to talk it over with Yaakov first. But the water supply and the Foo Fighters music were the least of it. There were other things, far more serious and gargantuan, that she was keeping from the man she loved. How had that happened? And how much longer could she keep it up? Perhaps, she admitted to herself, dancing to her old playlist had been her stubborn way of fighting back against so many things she was being forced to do that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about or share.

“What happened that the whole neighborhood is talking?” Fruma Esther demanded, settling herself heavily into the sinking cushions of the worn sofa as she gave up the effort to divide her dwindling strength between this confrontation and the considerable effort needed to keep herself standing upright.

“Is it?” Leah swallowed. “No one has said anything to me.”

“It’s spreading around the neighborhood like a disease, a virus. My phone doesn’t stop ringing.”

“And what are they telling you?”

“Loud, prutza music coming from my saintly Yaakov’s apartment. The children like wild animals jumping up and down, naked. And you…”

Leah’s heart contracted. “What about me?”

“Without your hair covering, behaving just like them … like the two-year-old.”

An ache stabbed her heart, yet she refused to give in. “My hair was covered. The children got hot, so they took off their shirts. Look, all I did was try to bring some joy to your poor grandchildren. They are suffering, Bubbee Fruma.”

All the exasperation suddenly left the old woman’s face. “What did you say … suffering? Since when?”

Leah moved her chair closer, describing the conversation with Chasya. Fruma Esther leaned forward, listening intently, her face pinched.

“She said that … my little Chasya? That she looks out of the window, waiting for her mameh to come home?”

Leah nodded, unhappy to bring this elderly woman such news even in self-defense.

They sat in silence for a few moments. “So you wanted to make some fun for them, to make the house freilich, that’s all, right?”

“That’s all, Bubbee Fruma.”

“And they were playing, and the music was on?”

Leah nodded.