“How are your parents?” he asked. He didn’t know them, but had been present at an intimate moment of their lives, which made him something other than a stranger.

“They’re away,” Noa offered. “Leonard is an archaeologist, and every summer he goes back to Israel to lead an excavation. And Monica is in Vienna, taking care of my grandmother.”

“And you stayed behind?”

Cutting a pear, Noa told him about her job at the florist shop, and how she was saving money to travel next summer. She had been many places with her parents, but never to South America. If she got as far as Chile and still had enough money, she would make the journey to Easter Island, to see the monolithic heads carved in volcanic stone that had fascinated her since she first saw photographs of their strange faces as a child. For a long time no one knew how their primitive makers had transported them from the quarry to the coast, where they were mounted on massive platforms, their faces turned inland. When Leonard told her, a few years later, that researchers had finally figured out how it was done, she was disappointed and didn’t want to know, preferring to preserve the mystery. It was a difference between her and Leonard, who had spent his life digging to the bottom of things. And Monica, too, a professor of comparative literature whose effort to squeeze the meaning out of German and Hebrew texts was exhaustive. It worried Noa that she couldn’t yet think of any profession that appealed to her in which this holding on to mystery had any value.

Avi listened with fascination, as if he were imagining her traveling alone on buses barreling through the jungle, around dangerous curving mountain passes, toward the mysteries of childhood. He, too, liked to travel, and had recently returned after two years of running the Chabad house in Bangkok. That he had seen the wider world might explain the knowingness Noa sensed in his face. She remembered how she had caught him looking at her during the get, and now she saw again that there was a flickering brightness in his eyes, a curiosity at odds with the conformity of his dark suit. The cigarette butts by the lawn chair must have been his, not the elder rabbi’s, a habit he might have picked up in Thailand. What place did curiosity have, Noa wondered, in a world like his?

“And what about you? Why’d you stay behind instead of going to the wedding with everyone else?”

“There’s no shortage of weddings. My mother is one of eight sisters and brothers. I have a cousin getting married nearly every month.”

She thought she should relinquish the envelope and go, but something kept her. Avi’s fingers rested on his empty tea glass, long and delicate. She saw him look at her bare legs, and the knowledge that such nakedness had never before been glimpsed in that kitchen gave her a sudden sense of power.