“Come with me.” He took my hand and led me to the men’s bathroom, locking the door behind us. “Look, Sheila, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about me and Heidi. We have a lot on our plate right now with this shivah and I just wanted to be done with it and—” He took a deep breath and started rolling on his heels. “I just wasn’t sure how you felt about me and I didn’t want to just assume that it was the same as me and I didn’t feel prepared to deal with rejection and—”

I grabbed him by the tie and pulled him toward me. “I think we’re on the same page, Matthew,” I said, smiling.

When Matthew kissed me, all thoughts of whitefish salad, hydrangeas, and Cousin Mort disappeared.

Toilets weren’t just for lunch anymore.

Chapter Twenty-one

The sandwich theorem, frequently used in calculus and real analysis, states that if a real-valued function (the filling) lies everywhere between two other real-valued functions (the bread) which both converge to the same limit, then the “middle function” also converges to that limit. The ham sandwich theorem can be used to prove mathematically that a single cut can divide two pieces of bread and the filling each exactly in half.

By the time the day of shivah arrived, everyone involved, including the judge, had forgotten it had anything to do with one dead Bob.

It was bad enough having to go to the torture chamber–cum–shee-vah headquarters on a Saturday. The fact that the day would be more hectic than most presidential inaugurations made it that much worse. After all, “we rilly had so much to do.” Whatever that entailed, I was prepared—at least in terms of fashion. I put on a super cute black dress I’d bought at Saks when I was in New York a few weeks earlier, checking out Puja’s new apartment in the West Village, where James was temporarily crashing.

James’s judge had suddenly retired, after a tragic (and hush-hush) episode involving his electric scooter and a pedestrian. James had happily broken his lease in Philly and moved back to New York. Ever since the blizzard, James and Puja had been inseparable. My mother was sleeping better at night. So was I.

Over the past two months, I’d shed ten pounds and returned to my usual size. It was pretty easy actually—I’d laid off the meatballs and started jogging again. The pimples had come around with less frequency and I’d stopped picking my hair. All in all, I had started to look, if not feel, better. Having a sex life again didn’t hurt either.

Matthew and I shared a cab to the courthouse from my apartment. We went through our checklist of everything necessary for the day, “tending to the judge,” being the first.