“Hi,” Leora stuttered.

“It’s great to see you again.” Jason grinned at her, and then motioned toward the woman. “I don’t think you’ve ever met Rivka, my wife.”

Leora’s jaw dropped for a second. The memory flitted through her mind of the only other time she had ever heard Jason use that word: “I realize you are not the woman who is going to be my wife.” It took all of the muscles in her face to force a smile. “Wow, congratulations! When did you get married?”

“Two months ago,” Rivka replied. She had a low, mature-sounding voice, which secretly disappointed Leora. A normal American accent. “We got married in Jerusalem. We just came back to the States a few weeks ago, actually.”

Leora always hated it when people referred to America as “the States.” As if the whole place were some ad hoc collection of random entities that just happen to be side by side, a bunch of unrelated stores on a crowded street. How could Rivka, Leora thought, who had clearly grown up here, stand here in Costco and pretend not to get it? America was no cluttered, crooked little thousand-year-old street with fifty different stores each selling its own kind of unpasteurized goat cheese. No, America was Big, New, Open 24 Hours, Cost-Effective, Buy It in Bulk, Bulk, Bulk! America was Members Only, Anyone Can Join, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave! What was this bullshit about coming back to “the States”?

“How exciting!” Leora said. And then, turning to Jason: “So what are you up to these days—besides being married, I mean?” She laughed a forced laugh at her own little joke, trying to convince herself that she meant it as a joke.

But Jason didn’t even smile. “Working on Forty-seventh Street in New York,” he said into his beard. “Rivka’s father owns a diamond business there.”

“Oh. Well, that’s something new,” Leora answered. And it took all of her strength to stop herself from saying what she was dying to say: What about medical school? What about the old people? What about—Jason?

Rivka suddenly turned to him, tugging on his sleeve. “Come on, Yehudah, we need to go now.”

“Okay,” he said. “It was good seeing you,” he told Leora, with the sort of smile he usually reserved for strangers in the nursing home. “Give my best wishes to your family.” And then Rivka dragged him away, leading him beside the still waters of Poland Spring.

Yehudah?

WHEN LEORA was very little, long before she knew any of the Landsmanns, she and her mother were cleaning out a closet together in their house, and her mother came across a brown, beat-up piece of paper at the bottom of a box filled with outdated children’s clothes. It was a story her mother had written for her first-grade class, in 1953, some forgettable composition that probably required her to use certain spelling words. But at the time, Leora wasn’t interested at all in the content, or even in the strange browning ink that came from a dipped pen nib (can anyone believe now that people wrote like that in school, that late?). No, what interested Leora was the name in the corner of the page.