For Iris and Remy it’s less complicated. They love to visit their grandmother, love the beach, which Tamar takes them to in the evenings, love the food, the late bedtimes, the access to a warm, relaxed updraft of freedom so different from the climate in New York. And they are over the moon about meeting the baby. They’ve already FaceTimed with their newborn cousin, and Remy has insisted on packing his little rollaway with toys and books he’s grown out of, to pass on to the five-week-old, who does not yet have a name because Shlomi and Dan are still “getting to know him.” The kids cannot wait to hold the baby, they say as they are patted down at the special gate for the United flight from Newark to Israel. Iris, who is fifteen, which in communities the world over and through time makes her of acceptable childbearing age, is going to “eat the baby up,” and Remy is going to see if he can be the first to make him smile. Tucked into the pocket of Remy’s rollaway is also the pack of cards that has gone everywhere with him the last weeks, at the ready for the practice or performance of a sleight of hand. But neither Remy nor Iris mention anything about meeting the Husband, having gathered, through looks or tones or curt phrases, a measure of their mother’s opinion. A few days earlier, Tamar overheard Remy in Iris’s room, telling her that the Husband had collaborated with Erdős, and so had an Erdős number of one. If he had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with Erdős, he would have an Erdős number of two, and if he had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with Erdős, it would be a three. Someone who had never collaborated with Erdős would have an Erdős number of infinity. But he had a one! And he was going to take Remy to see a Maccabi game.

Who’s Erdős? asked Iris.

A genius who wrote more mathematical papers than anyone, solved some of the hardest problems in the world, and lived out of his suitcase, Remy informed her with a note of pride.

But the Husband is no longer living out of a suitcase. He has bettered Erdős on that problem, Tamar thinks, having read up on Erdős in Wikipedia. He has refuted Erdős’s theory that women capture men and enslave them into marriage, and has offered himself as a lost husband, and so has won a place for his suitcase in the basement storage unit, having gone and unpacked all of its contents and laid them in what were formerly her father’s drawers.