This had been the way for nearly as long as Bluma could remember.

“Hope she’s feeling all right,” said Zalman, his voice jumping with the exertion of his work. “Here,” he said. “Take her a bit of milk and some rugelach. She’ll like that.”

Bluma’s bubbe, as a rule, did not care for people. She took what little food she ate on her own schedule and often in her own room. Once a week, on Fridays, she would come down to make a pot of chicken soup, and when they all sat down to eat it, she would quietly wish her son and her granddaughter a good Sabbath.

She never spoke to Bluma’s mother.

Bluma arrived outside her grandmother’s bedroom door and tapped lightly with her knuckle, twice.

“Bubbe?”

For a period of time, Bluma had spent her days reading on the little landing just outside her bubbe’s bedroom door. She’d hardly meant to make a habit of it, but while she’d lain there one morning, her grandmother had pulled open the door. Bluma had expected to be shooed away, but her bubbe had simply stared down at her. After a moment, she’d left the door hanging open and gone about her business.

They had lived quietly in parallel, then—Bluma reading on the landing with her pillow, and her bubbe within, occupying herself with needlework or tidying. Often she would sit in front of the oblong mirror on her wall and make a silent accounting of the dissatisfactions she found in her face.

And then one day the door had swung open in the morning and almost immediately slammed shut again. When Bluma had gone to use the bathroom, her pillow had been moved back down onto her bed, and that had been that.

All the same, Bluma held the quiet certainty that she had shared something with her grandmother that no one else in the house had ever seen.

And this was correct.

Again: one knuckle, two taps.

“Bubbe?”

There was no answer.

The bedroom door was hung to swing inward, and with every creaking moment that Bluma spent pushing it, she still thought she might find her grandmother there, just behind the opening door.

But she didn’t.

Her bubbe was gone.

—

The sky was heavy, and Yehuda Leib longed for the rain to come and relieve the pressure.

His mouth ached.

Issur had only gotten one good hit in—despite his superior size, he was really worth almost nothing in a fight—but as luck would have it, his fist had caught Yehuda Leib square on the lip, and it was beginning to swell.

Yehuda Leib was too wise to stick around once they’d been hauled apart—it didn’t matter who was at fault when one of the combatants was Issur “God’s Gift to Tupik” Frumkin and the other was a grubby, fatherless thief, and so he’d made himself scarce among the rooftops.