He put down the bag of laundry and inserted the key into the door lock. A sour taste rose from his throat. He opened the door.

Hersh looked up, then turned his eyes back to the TV. Noam thought—watching those kind of movies again. He came inside and closed the door. Waited for instructions. He had to go to the toilet but was too nervous to leave the room until Hersh talked to him.

Hersh just kept watching TV. Then he pointed to a spot on the floor and told Noam to leave the laundry there. Noam swallowed, got up enough nerve to ask if he could go to the bathroom.

Hersh said, “Why you askin’ me? You got a plumbin’ problem or somethin’?”

“No,” Noam whispered. He rushed off to the bathroom and threw up. Tried to be as quiet about it as possible. But Hersh was staring at him when he came back in.

“You sick or somethin’?”

“I guess the food didn’t go down real good,” Noam said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty shitty,” Hersh said. “We’ll buy better stuff next time, ’kay?”

Noam nodded. That was the real killer—you never knew how he was going to take things. Now he was acting all nice. He thought maybe now was a good time to bring up going home, but something warned him off.

Don’t push it.

Noam said, “I can fold the laundry if you want. I’m real good at that. My…my mother—”

“I don’t want to hear about your fuckin’ mother, Nick-O. She’s a bitch, right? Ain’t that what you told me?”

That wasn’t what he’d told him. Noam had told him that his eema was mean and critical and never had a minute to listen to him. But he had never, never called her a bitch. He could never do that. But he nodded anyway.

How could he have been so stupid!

Noam dumped out the clothes and started folding them.

“Hersh?”

“Hank,” Hersh said, eyes still on the TV. “How many fuckin’ times do I have to tell you it’s Hank?”

Yeah, it was Hank this time, Noam thought. Hersh had gone through at least a half-dozen names in the past six months. There was Tony and Frankie. Then it was Heinrich and Hart. Hart, Hersh said, was the name of a movie star. When Noam told him the name sounded sort of like a faygala, Hersh flew into a rage. From then on it was Hank. Remember! Hank! Hank! Hank!

“Hank?” Noam tried.

“What?”

“I got ’em,” Noam announced.

Hersh pointed the remote at the TV screen and flicked it off. Noam saw him turn slowly, regard his face. Then he flashed that crooked smile of his. Sometimes the smile meant he was happy, sometimes it meant he was mad. But it was always a weird smile, scary. Hersh was nodding now.

“You got ’em?”

“I got ’em,” Noam said.