“That’s how everyone feels about it,” Jason said, picking up Gatorade number three. “And the difficult part isn’t that these people are so close to dying, either. Because if you were visiting an intensive care unit in a hospital, you wouldn’t feel that way. It would be scary, sure, but there would be a sort of drama to it. You could visit the patients there and think to yourself, Oh my God, this twenty-five-year-old with cancer could be me, and therefore my visit was Worthwhile, because I learned something Meaningful.”

She winced, but Jason didn’t notice. He paused for a moment to consume his third glass of Gatorade, then continued. “In a nursing home, there’s no drama. It’s not like it’s a twist of fate or anything. There’s just this awful . . . normalness. The upsetting part isn’t that the people there are dying. It’s that they’re alone. Their spouses and friends are dead. Their children are busy with their own lives. They have people who take care of them, bringing them their food and medicine and all that, but they don’t have anyone who cares for them. I want to care for them.”

Leora sat back, stunned. Somehow she had expected this little speech to end the way it always did with people their age—that is, with Jason announcing that “someone” had to do something about it, and therefore he had found himself a summer job stuffing envelopes for the American Association of Retired Persons. But actually working in a nursing home? She stuttered, “Are you kidding me?”

Jason shook his head, glancing down at the fourth glass of Gatorade before picking it up and pouring it down his throat, almost without swallowing. “No. That’s what I do every summer. I volunteer at the Beth Israel Nursing Home. My parents think I’m crazy. I tell them that it will help me get into medical school, but the only reason I want to go to medical school at all is so that I’ll have some skills and get paid for this kind of thing in the future. It’s actually just about old people.” Jason used part of the shredded napkin to wipe off his green mustache, twisting the rest of it into little tubes.

“Wow, Jason, you really are a mentsh.”

Jason looked up from his tray, puzzled. “What’s a mentsh?”

Leora smiled. “You mean you’ve been working in a Jewish nursing home all these years and you’ve never picked up any Yiddish?”

Jason’s fingers wandered back to the shredded napkin, twitching. “Well, you see, my family’s Jewish, but just barely, and—I mean, we don’t go to synagogue or anything, so—”

“Mentsh means ‘person,’ literally, but it’s used to mean a really good person. Someone who shows the world, through his actions, what it really means to be a person.”

“And that’s me?” Jason asked. Gatorade number five on deck. Slurped. Done.

Leora grinned at him. “Well, I think so.”

Jason snorted. “Nah, I’m no mentsh. I just like old people.”