A few nights later she became completely certain that she was right. That was the night when she lay in bed remembering her dream about her grandmother. She threw up that morning with a sense of purpose and decided that as soon as she saw Aaron, she would tell him.

WHEN LEAH went to work that morning, Aaron wasn’t there. Not typical of him—in fact, Leah couldn’t remember Aaron ever being late before. Abe the foreman had to sit at his desk for him, checking the workers in as they entered. As she sat down at her machine and began the day’s stitching, she began formulating her speech in her head, how she would break the news to him. Her first move, she decided, would be to tell him that they needed to buy the train tickets for California as soon as possible.

After the morning shift, though, Aaron still hadn’t appeared. That was when Abe approached Leah at her sewing machine and asked to speak to her outside. Surprised, Leah stood up and abandoned the machine. She strutted behind Abe’s thick back, following him out into the vestibule. Her sewing machine seemed like a single silent island in the factory’s raging sea.

Once they were outside, Abe turned to face her and handed her an envelope, the standard kind that were used for all the workers’ pay at their factory. “Mordy and I thought you should have this,” Abe said to her in a low voice.

Leah took the envelope, which had Aaron’s name on its front. Inside it was two weeks’ worth of Aaron’s pay—three times what Leah earned.

“Why?” Leah asked in her chopping-block voice.

“You mean you haven’t heard?” Abe asked, turning pale.

Leah felt the air in the room change color. “Heard?”

Abe stared at the floor. “There was a fire in the boardinghouse on Rivington Street last night. Somebody put a shirt or something over a gaslamp, probably some kid. They managed to get most of the people out of the building, but Aaron was sleeping on the top floor. It was probably the smoke that got him first, but the room burned so badly that he could never have survived it. Luckily when they got him out they could still identify the body.”

The body. In Europe, he would have been buried directly in the ground. But since this was America, the land where everything came in a wrapper, they had to bury him inside a wooden box, so that his charred body would never touch the earth again.

THERE WAS no official mourning period, because nearly all of those who would have been official mourners were dead. Except, of course, for Aaron’s wife, but no one knew about her besides the factory foremen.