Who? her mother asks, but with a telltale twitch of her eyelid, as if the wizened Husband who once collaborated with Erdős had grabbed his hat and shimmied out through the window just as they came in through the door, Erdős who chose for his gravestone the epitaph “Finally I am growing stupider no more.”

Grandma! shouts Remy, racing into the kitchen with the pack of cards just in time to get her mother off the hook. Can I show you a trick?

But even if the Husband came out of nowhere and nothing, it does not mean her mother can send him back to nowhere and nothing whenever it’s convenient: in the bathroom, Tamar discovers a toothbrush with flattened bristles in the glass next to her mother’s.

That evening they all take a taxi to Jaffa to visit the new baby. He has a head of black hair, but otherwise he is the spitting image of Tamar and Shlomi’s father. From deep within the turquoise wrap that Dan already ties like an expert, the infant looks out in great peace, as if he has already seen the world beyond and has come back to observe, with bottomless compassion, the fucked-up earthly things they’ve all gotten up to. When at last he is unpacked from the carrier and handed round, and Tamar lays him down on her thighs, he bestows on her his cloudy, beatific gaze. On and on everyone goes about how he looks exactly like Eli—Eli down to the little cleft in his chin! but an Eli without a bark, an Eli without claws!—and Tamar can’t help but feel the real point being made by her mother and brother, the not-so-subtle subtext, is that her father is looking down on it all—Shlomi’s marriage, her divorce, the arrival of the Husband who plans to replace him—with a vast and yielding acceptance, with the kind of tolerance that had not been available to him on this side of life. It was not an accident that Shlomi waited until their father died before marrying Dan. Nor that Tamar hung on in her marriage as long as she did, until, less than a year after her father was gone, she finally let go. Eli’s strong opinions, and the volume and intensity with which he expressed them, made it easier to just work around him rather than confront his forcefulness head-on. They’d learned it early on from their mother, who would let their father bluster and blow, and afterward, once he was asleep, or at work, or with his back turned, would let them have what they’d asked for, or find a quiet way to show them how to take it for themselves.