It was a neighborhood of modest houses set back from front lawns unadorned by flowers. In the dusk, the Hasids went past at a tilt in dark suits, in denial of the heat, the women in long skirts and sleeves pushing and lugging children, bent and hurrying. Always hurrying, these people—it was Leonard’s voice she heard in her head. Hurrying to get one last mitzvah under the belt, though the Messiah himself, that great scorekeeper of Jewish action, Jewish fate, was in no hurry himself.

The rabbi’s house was as nondescript as the rest, aside from an aluminum frame chair left out under a tree, the nylon straps of the seat sagging deeply, as if someone had sat many hours thinking there. But when Noa parked and crossed the lawn at a diagonal on the way to the front door, she saw that the patchy grass around the chair was littered with cigarette butts, the chair merely the seat of a bad habit the rabbi’s wife wouldn’t condone in the house.

With Leonard and Monica’s divorce papers under her arm, she rang the bell. But when the door opened, it wasn’t the rabbi’s wife, but the young assistant with the sparse blond beard. His face brightened with surprise when he saw her. She asked if the rabbi was home, holding up the envelope by way of explanation. No, the young rabbi said, the whole family was at a wedding. “Seems everyone is getting married today,” Noa said.

The young rabbi raised his eyebrows and smiled. She clutched the envelope, not yet ready to give it up. Did she want to come in? he asked.

Noa wondered if he had even heard about the fires, which couldn’t be smelled from there. A bowl of fruit, pears and purple grapes, their skin ripe and frosted, was set out on the kitchen table. Sit down, he offered, gesturing to a chair. He boiled water in the kettle for tea, and brought her some in a glass. She sipped it, grateful for his simple act of kindness. Watching the familiar ease with which he moved around the kitchen, it occurred to her that this was not merely an assistant but the rabbi’s son. He sat down opposite her and stirred a spoonful of sugar into his own glass, his lips moving in silent blessing before he drank.

“Noa, right?” he said.

She couldn’t remember introducing herself by name on the day of the get, but he must have heard her parents or sister address her.

“I’m Aviel, but everyone calls me Avi.”

Noa looked hungrily at the fruit, and Avi, sensitive and alert, pushed the bowl toward her.

“Please, take,” he said, and got up to bring her a plate and knife. She thought of the Hasids who sometimes stood on street corners, stopping passersby to ask if they were Jewish, and if they wanted Shabbat candles, or to put on tefillin, and wondered if Avi’s hospitality was merely practical, born of the Rebbe’s command to draw in wayward Jews, to bring them into the fold where they, too, could add to the count of mitzvot that would hasten the coming of the Moshiach.