Aaron leaned on his elbows along the windowsill, holding the ring between his fingers at eye level, as if displaying it to the night sky. This time a light came on across the outhouse alley, about twenty feet away. As the light glowed brighter, a thick man appeared framed in the window, like a painting hanging on a wall. The buildings were close enough together so that soon Leah could make out every feature of his face. It was Abe, the foreman. “You kept me waiting forever!” he yelled back.

“Where’s Mordy? Get him,” Aaron shouted.

The man craned his head upward, and to Leah it looked as if nothing else existed in the world other than that window across the alley, as if once the man stepped out of that window frame and into the next room, he would disappear forever. The tension in her chest trickled into streams of relief as she saw that Abe didn’t leave the window, but instead shouted toward the ceiling, “Hey Mordy, he’s there with the girl now, so get over here!” As if out of nowhere, Mordy appeared in the framed window above Abe’s head; the two men stood in their windows one above the other, like framed portraits. How strange, Leah thought to herself, to see the big factory foremen, the same ones who yelled at the machine girls all day long, standing in their nightshirts.

“See this ring?” Aaron shouted, jabbing at the air with his clenched fingers. He twisted the ring around his thumb a few times so that they could see it flash in the gaslight.

“Yeah, we see it,” Abe shouted back.

“You too, Mordy?” Aaron called out.

The answer hurtled back in Mordy’s nasal voice, the voice that had so many times screeched at Leah to get the assembly line moving faster, faster, you lazy broad, we have an inventory to meet, do you want to be sacked? “Yeah, like he told you, we see it! Enough already! We’re working the early shift tomorrow, we want to go to sleep!”

“This will only take a minute,” Aaron answered, just as loud. Then he turned and whispered to Leah, “Are you ready?”

Leah looked at him, her heart racing. Her lips were trembling so much that she could barely answer. Then suddenly she felt something she had never felt before, a whoosh of hot air that came up between her legs and through her stomach and heart all the way to her head, as if her soul were being burned out of her body and into the night air. She stretched out her hand and said, “Yes.”

Aaron straightened his back, drawing a deep breath. Looking straight at Leah, he bellowed into the night: “BEHOLD, YOU ARE SANCTIFIED TO ME WITH THIS RING ACCORDING TO THE LAWS OF MOSES AND ISRAEL!”