But the next time she speaks to her mother is not until the following day, because she doesn’t pick up when Tamar tries her on the train back to Riverdale. This comes as a surprise: her mother has always picked up. It is already midnight in Tel Aviv, but her mother never goes to bed any earlier, which has always made the time difference between them less of an obstacle to keeping in close touch. Over the nineteen years that Tamar has lived in New York, she’s gotten used to those late-afternoon/late-night conversations three or even four times a week, conversations during which she had at least eighty-five percent of her mother’s attention, the rest remaining available to the wonders and trials being broadcast on her mother’s TV. Sometimes her mother would interrupt their conversation to tell Tamar some fabulous fact about the Bengali tigers or the Alhambra, or to inform her of the struggles of children living in the slums of Beirut, or that an island in Greece was the place in the world whose inhabitants live the longest. If these conversations comforted Tamar, it was in part because they went all the way back to her childhood, to the privileged hours she used to spend in her mother’s presence while her brother napped, basking in her attention, which seemed only marginally taken up by the pile of elementary-school tests in her lap that she corrected with a red pen.

When her mother doesn’t pick up, Tamar calls Shlomi. She isn’t worried, not really, but because worry has always been the currency of love in her family, rarely does anyone miss an opportunity to express it. Of the four of them, when there were still four, only Shlomi was relatively free of the habit, probably because their parents spent so many years worrying about him that he developed an allergy to it.

Shlomi is a night person like her mother, though only since he met Dan can he be found home at midnight. For the twenty or so years before that, Shlomi was out from nine p.m. until two or three in the morning, though it was often impossible to know when those hours fell for him, since his work as a DJ took him all over the world. But now that he has settled down and gotten married, he travels much less, and soon, once the surrogate expecting their baby in Nepal delivers, he will not be traveling at all. But Shlomi’s circadian rhythms, fixed from his teenage years or maybe much earlier, come through to him from their mother’s milk, can’t be reset, which means that he picks up after two rings, using the nickname he’s called her since they were little: What’s up, Tash?