But as the words are about to leave her mouth, she realizes that her brother might be right. Maybe she is being defensive. Her mother, who has always been there to answer her calls, is now otherwise engaged, and maybe it’s gotten to her a bit. They’ve shared a condition, haven’t they? Two independent women without husbands, managing just fine on their own, thank you very much. In its way, it’s only strengthened the bond between them. Neither of them suffered overly without a husband. Their situations were different, of course: her parents stayed together for forty-seven years before death put an end to it, whereas Tamar and David chose to break their marriage after only ten. Tamar can claim the position of being not interested in another husband, of being “beyond husbandry,” as she sometimes puts it to her friends, whereas for her mother the subject of another husband is—was, until then—a moot point. But even if her mother chose to keep her husband and Tamar did not, something in them has always seemed to her in tacit agreement about the relative peace and quiet of being without one, its lack of demand after a long period of trying to fulfill a high level of demand. She likes that her mother never goes on, the way the mothers of other divorced women she knows go on, about how she should find someone while she still has her looks. And if Tamar does eventually stumble on a man she wishes to be bound to—in other words, a man other than the thirty-two-year-old electronic musician she slept with until she got tired of doing his laundry or he left for Peru, or the trial lawyer who had an outsize personality but, in the end, a shrunken heart—her mother will no doubt be happy for her. Is she happy for her mother?

She calls Katie.

Maybe I feel abandoned? Tamar suggests, as the Metro North train pulls out of University Heights on its way to the city.

Or just a little jealous, Katie says.

Jealous? Of a little old Hungarian? He makes mulberry jam. And they play chess together.

Of your mother finding love again, Katie says.

Tamar sits holding the phone to her ear, watching the chainlink fences and telephone poles fly by as the train hurtles toward Harlem. Love. It has not yet dawned on her that it might be that. Because what are the odds, really? That somewhere in the annals of Special Services, that little-known agency of the state, there is some Israeli Cupid at work, busily matching widows and widowers with a greater success rate than Tinder?

Uh-uh, she says, there’s no way. She just met him! It’ll probably be over in a week. Trust me, she assures her, even though Katie doesn’t have a horse in the race.