Leora pretended not to notice that anything had changed. She followed Jason through the zoo, which by now had begun to feel like a sort of home for the two of them, until they reached the ocelots—an exhibit, Jason had told her, that had just been installed the previous year, with animals on loan from a larger zoo in New York. Jason sat down on a bench at the far end of the exhibit, staring into space. Leora sat down next to him, but Jason ignored her. On the other occasions when they had visited the ocelots, the animals, who were nocturnal according to the explanatory plaque, were almost always asleep. But this time one of the ocelots had just emerged from the shady brush. Leora watched as it climbed out of the scrubby foliage and began walking across the exhibit’s tall grass. Its coat was beautiful, dark yellow and gray and glowing with white spots, like a leopard’s spots, on its graceful back. The ocelot walked, one foot in front of another in a sort of musical harmony, across the exhibit and then settled down onto a log with its front legs first, stretching its whole furry body out in the sun, its eyes focused on some point in the distance. It looked so peaceful and gentle as it lay on the rock, in such perfect agreement with the world, that Leora almost wished she could climb over the glass barrier and walk up to it, leaning over to pet its silky, graceful back. But then the ocelot suddenly raised its head, squinted its eyes shut, and reared back its head to drop its jaw in a horrifying yawn, revealing long fangs that glinted in the sunlight.

Jason didn’t seem to notice. Instead he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and staring at the label on the exhibit, as if the root of his problem had something to do with the Growth and Development of the Endangered South American Ocelot. Leora inched her hand toward his, but some time passed before he took it. After a few moments he dropped his eyes to the ground. “Remember Mr. Rosenthal, who I was visiting at work?” he asked. “He died today.”

Leora felt very hot all of a sudden, but she didn’t say anything.

Jason snorted. “I know you’re thinking it’s no big deal, since it’s a nursing home and everything.”

“No I’m not,” Leora said. Which was a lie, since that was precisely what she was thinking. Old dead people didn’t impress her very much. She suddenly pictured herself sitting on that bench in the East Mountain Reservation, next to Bill Landsmann, above his dead father. Suicides, she remembered, cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery. That is Jewish law.

Jason snorted again. He had a habit of snorting whenever he didn’t like what he thought someone else was thinking. Everyone else on the soccer team did the same thing. “But that’s not what’s bothering me,” he said. “What’s really bothering me is a story this man told me about a month ago.”