But the following Saturday, Tamar comes into the kitchen fresh from the shower and finds Remy, who always FaceTimes with her mother on Saturday mornings, learning a card trick from the Husband. She hears his voice first, a deep tenor with an accent refined and educated, savvy and world-weary, soaked in a broth of middle European languages, an old-world accent that went out of production after 1945. She steps closer, careful to stay out of the camera’s range. She can see his face on the screen, and in the top left corner Remy’s eyes, beaming behind the hand of cards he is clutching. Until then the Husband has not been entirely real. He’s been only an old man in a hat, utterly absurd in his way. But now here he is, talking to her son. Charming him, just as he charmed her mother and Shlomi. She steps into view, casting a shadow over Remy’s bright face.

I’m Tamar, she says coolly. The daughter.

The Husband says nothing, but his heavy-lidded eyes, full of intelligence, take her in. He doesn’t look at all the way she imagined, at once wiser and somewhat younger, more alive, with blue eyes and a white beard she hadn’t expected that is neatly trimmed to make visible his full lips, lips that would not have been out of place on a child. They regard each other with raised hackles, and yet only one of them, Tamar thinks with satisfaction, is a scavenger.

So what are your plans? she demands, while Remy watches both of their faces on the screen.

Plans for what? the Husband asks, surprised. Behind him she can see the windows of her mother’s living room, and, on the wall just to the right of his head, a framed photograph of her and Shlomi at Iris and Remy’s ages, her with a whale-spout ponytail in a scrunchie, and Shlomi channeling the Karate Kid.

Your gig in Netanya is up, or what? You can still stay there, or you’re planning to move to Tel Aviv?

She’d intended to say “planning to move into our mother’s apartment,” but something about his gaze, deerlike, makes her swerve at the last instant.

Netanya is finished, he says simply, without further explanation.

Remy, unable to parse the dialogue, glances up at his mother. We were in the middle of a trick, he pleads.

So you were, Tamar says, raising an eyebrow at the Husband so that her point will not be lost. So you were. And, turning on her heel, she stomps off to brew the coffee.

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