“You left your partner-track job,” my dad says.

“That’s different. Max needed me. I needed to be home for my family.”

“We would have been fine if you kept working too, honey. We would have made it work. It was a choice you made.”

“It didn’t feel like a choice,” my mother says flatly.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t change things now,” my dad says.

She must be filling the kettle because their voices get lost first in the rush of water from the tap and then in the heavy whoosh of boiling water. I hug my knees tighter. This doesn’t sound like their usual bantering. My mother sounds upset.

The whooshing stops, and I can hear my parents’ voices again.

“Well, they didn’t even bring it to the board or we never would have let it get to this point,” my mom says. She pauses. “But the board needs to support Adler, of course.”

“Lori,” my dad says.

“I know,” she says heavily. “I feel sick about the whole thing.”

“Can you make it right?”

There’s a pause. “I’ll try,” she says.

Mr. Sandler taught us that while the plot of a story is what happens in it, the theme is the main idea that you can take away and think about afterward. I didn’t raise my hand in Ms. Silver’s class, but if I had, I might have said that the theme in Cashews is what happens when someone is unfairly punished, and whether some people are just lucky or unlucky, or whether we all have control over our own fate and destiny. I feel it’s unlucky Mr. Sandler got in a fight with Rabbi Adler, and I am not sure if this was his fault and whether it was something he could have controlled or not. It’s unlucky for our class, and for me, that we aren’t going to have Mr. Sandler anymore.

“Mr. Sandler stood up for what he believed in, and for himself—that has nothing to do with lucky or unlucky,” Honey says the next day after school. She’s on the massage table in our extra room, her ponytail loosened and pushed back so she can lie flat, staring up at the ceiling. There were all kinds of rumors flying around in the hallways at school about where Mr. Sandler is and if Ms. Silver is here to stay, but I didn’t tell anyone except Honey what I overheard from my parents.

“Yeah, but was it his destiny to get in a fight with Rabbi Adler or could he have avoided it?” I say.

“Milla, what does it matter? It’s like you’re asking about hashgachah pratis.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like you’re asking if Hashem makes people do things or if we have free will to decide things for ourselves.”

“Oh,” I say. I guess she’s right.

“Milla, all we know is what happened, happened. They both made choices.”

“Yeah. It’s just … He acted like we were really important to him, like he really cared about us,” I say. “But then he just left us.”