After it was over, they drove to the Italian place Leonard and Monica liked. Leonard’s opera albums filled the CD changer in the trunk; Pavarotti flowed forth. Noa had one more year left of school, and over their salads Leonard and Monica told her that in the fall they would take turns living in the house with her until she graduated. This was a nebulous plan, it being only May. As for the summer, they gave Noa the choice of going to Megiddo with Leonard, or Vienna with Monica. She protested: last year she had spent her summer working at a florist shop, and she planned to do the same again. She was saving money to travel to Brazil, Peru, Argentina, maybe as far as Easter Island, after she graduated from high school. Why should she have to change her plans just because her parents had decided to upend their lives? She would be bored in Megiddo, and claustrophobic in her grandmother’s apartment crowded with heavy furniture, the silk curtains permanently closed to keep out the sun. An argument ensued, but Noa stood her ground. She would be perfectly fine on her own, she insisted. Rachel wasn’t listening, busy texting her boyfriend in Boston. In Rachel’s features, Leonard and Monica had found an early harmony, unlike in Noa’s, where, after puberty, Leonard had prevailed. She’d also inherited Leonard’s height, which made it easy for her parents to see her as older than she was. Besides, practical as they were, Leonard and Monica had always believed in treating their children like adults. So why make a show of treating her like a child now? She dug in until her parents gave up. If they felt guilty about the divorce, or following the course of their own desires, they hadn’t sustained it for long. Leonard left for Israel in mid-June, and Monica a week later. Jack and Roberta Berkowitz, her parents’ oldest friends, were enlisted to check on her, which Roberta did, calling from the aisles of Whole Foods to see if Noa wanted to come for dinner, or if there was anything that she needed. But there never was.

In the kitchen, Noa boiled water for coffee. The only remaining full-time occupant of a house that would be sold in a year, she rearranged things as she saw fit. The Sumerian fer-tility jug that her parents had bought together the year they’d met, she put in the hall closet behind Leonard’s tennis rackets. Fat and earthy, it had a foreboding air. She also took down the photos from the fridge. Rachel and Noa, Leonard and Monica, smiling glibly at the top of a mountain, or in the golden light of the desert, now possessed a false quality. The whole house, it seemed, had been organized around principles that were no longer true, and now these arrangements seemed disingenuous. Maybe that was why Noa had stopped sleeping in her bedroom after her parents left, and taken to sleeping on the sofa instead. This had bothered Gabe. He didn’t like having the poster of Goya’s old man staring down on his nudity. He called him Old Egghead, and blamed him for ruining things. But two weeks earlier they had broken up, and she left Old Egghead on the wall. Lying on the sofa under his purview, Noa could see the dining room table where her family had always celebrated Passover, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and other special occasions, accompanied by friends and family. Her cousins called her uncle and aunt Daddy and Mommy, something she had sometimes envied. But close as she was with her own parents, those two words possessed a kind of intimacy, a silliness even, that didn’t fit Leonard and Monica, and would have made her embarrassed to utter. One summer at the kibbutz when she was seven or eight, Noa had taken to calling her father Abba, but when they returned home at the end of August the name had been left behind with the other toys, stones, and knickknacks they had collected over the summer, which could not fit into the suitcase, or would not be needed back home.