She didn’t look at him, he didn’t let go of her hand.

“What happened?” he asked, and she thought of Adam stabbed, bleeding, falling. Weeping naked eyeballs, gashed face full of pancake and rouge. And dead bodies thrown around like trash, broken, pulled to pieces, covered with clay. She didn’t even have the best stories. She should send him back to her house to hear Jacob’s stories about Belzec, or Luria’s. Or out into Golda’s kitchen to listen to Abe Dworkin’s. What happened? was the wrong question to ask in Laurel. She laughed and he looked startled.

“Excuse me,” she said and headed for the kitchen. Abe Dworkin was there with Marge O’Shea, a black woman who’d answered Golda’s ad in the Irish Echo ten years ago and had worked for her ever since. Marge was putting triangles of lox on toast points already smeared with cream cheese; Dworkin was preening.

“How do I look?” he asked Rachel, smoothing back his thick white hair on either side of his cap.

“Spiffy,” she said. “Got a date?”

“Yeah.” He deflated. “At Isaac’s house, watching TV and playing clabiash with the old cockers.”

Rachel said, “Stay in the kitchen with me. We’ll get drunk together.” He smiled. Rachel had started to help Marge with the lox when she saw the kitchen door open, and she knew it was Allan Siegal. She ran out to the back porch where Golda kept her second refrigerator and her deep freeze and stayed in the shadows while Siegal pretended to look for ice. He said something to Marge, took a canapé, and left. Rachel wanted to stay on the porch but it was cold and all she had on was the skirt and blouse. She went back inside.

“Nu, you staying with me, you ain’t staying with me?” Dworkin complained.

“I ain’t staying with you.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said, buttoning his coat.

She went out into the hall, keeping close to the stairs, but Siegal was watching for her, and when she reached the foyer, he left the people he was talking to, and started toward her. She went up the stairs. She didn’t know why she was running away from him, but she couldn’t stop. The den door was closed, but she heard the TV and she thought she could go in there and watch the New Year in with the kids, surrounded by the guests’ mink coats. But when she opened the door, she saw Gerry Samson and Selma Rubin on the couch; Selma’s head was back, her legs were spread, and Gerry’s hand was under her skirt. Selma was panting and the movement of Gerry’s hand made something in Rachel’s insides turn over. She backed out and closed the door softly.