One evening in early spring, Leora was wandering through this wonderland, hauling several giant bags of Catco Multimax Foodplex, when she fell upon the matzoh aisle. Towering before her eyes on her left stood a seven-foot-high castle built entirely of giant green and orange boxes of Manischewitz matzoh. It crossed her mind that Passover was fast approaching. Perhaps she should buy a few boxes of matzoh for her mother. As Leora tried to slow down her cat-food-laden forklift of a cart, however, its weight made it slide forward until it slammed into the matzoh tower. Several boxes of matzoh tumbled down from the tower into the cart of a Hassidic man and woman, whose cart had meanwhile slammed into hers under the rain of matzoh boxes.

“I’m so sorry,” Leora said, though she smiled to herself at the symmetry of it, at the idea that the matzoh had fallen into the cart of someone who might actually want it. Feigning nonchalance, she immediately started picking up the boxes out of their cart, deliberately not lifting her head on the off chance that the man and woman might somehow interpret it as a slight. As she straightened up to put the boxes back on top of the matzoh tower, she indulged a glance at the man and was surprised to see that he was staring right at her. Suddenly she dropped the matzoh. It was Jason.

“Hi, Leora,” he said with a smile. “How are you?”

He had gotten thinner, she noticed. His neck, once thickly set with muscles, had slimmed down to become a much looser link between his head and his body, like a young, sturdy branch of a slightly twisted tree. Between the sides of his black cloak, his white-shirted stomach seemed narrow and gaunt, his dark belt fastened on its tightest notch to hold up his black pants. His hands were thin and pale. And his face was nearly covered by a mustache, beard, and sidelocks, the hairs long and bristly from years of shaving. But something had returned to him that Leora hadn’t seen since he broke his leg a year and a half earlier. Without the weight of his old muscles, he seemed lighter somehow, less burdened, his shoulders straighter, his head more erect. And his black hat and dark suit made him look as if he were wearing a costume, as if he might at any moment pull the beard off his face to show off his shiny soccer-victory grin.

The woman standing next to him wore a long skirt down to her ankles and a long-sleeved shirt with a high collar; her hair was completely covered by a tightly fitting hat. But there was something that distinguished her from the women Leora had seen at the East Mountain Zoo, and Leora couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She glanced again at the woman’s clothing, searching for some difference. But soon she saw that it wasn’t the clothes that set this woman apart from the women at the zoo. It was her face. Unlike those women, she didn’t look tired or flustered or exhausted. She only looked young.