Tamar is eating lunch in the West Seventy-Eighth Street office where she sees patients, but in Tel Aviv it is already evening. Her mother still lives there, in the same apartment where Tamar and her brother grew up, on Tchernichovsky Street, behind Gan Meir, whose trees can be seen through the large, dirty windows.

Who is it? her mother shouted into the receiver. But when she pressed the button to listen, no one was there.

Tamar spears a pineapple chunk and settles in for the story, just like she has for countless of her mother’s stories over the years: often long, usually funny or absurd, sometimes rudderless tales whose only point was to keep Tamar attached to the distant life of her family. Looking out at a slice of the sky that had been dumping slush on the city all morning, she sees the old door of the family apartment with its peeling brown laminate chipped at the bottom edge, and the plastic intercom covered in fingerprints inky from the newspaper, and is filled with a pleasant warmth.

I thought someone had pressed the wrong buzzer, her mother tells her, it happens all the time. When the baby upstairs was born, they pushed my buzzer like the flusher of the only toilet in a crowded bus station. But eventually everyone left, and since then it’s been quiet except for the sound of the baby screaming. The parents do their best, her mother said, but sometimes they shout at each other. They used to be so happy, so in love, but since the baby was born, they can’t agree on anything.

Sounds familiar, says Tamar, since she and the children’s father had stopped agreeing not long after their difficult first baby was born, though they’d hung on for nine or ten years before finally separating. After that, both Tamar and her mother had been single, her father having died a year earlier of a heart attack. There had been four of them in the family—her mother, her father, her younger brother, and Tamar—and for a long time three of them had been married, and only her brother remained unmarried. Then their father died, Tamar got divorced, and Shlomi married his boyfriend, making him the only one with a husband.

Her mother buzzed down to ask who was there, but when she pushed the button to listen, there was only the sound of a car driving past, of night in the city, a humid one by the sea. She went back to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and set it on the stove, but a minute later the buzzer sounded again. This time she ignored it, but it started up more impatiently: a few quick bursts and then a long angry buzz. All right, all right, her mother shouted. Who is it? And once more she pressed the button to listen.

Special services, a man said.