Esther may not have especially cared about where she had Thanksgiving dinner at this late stage of her life, but she had always fussed over her own Thanksgiving feasts throughout Rebecca’s childhood, taking pride in her production in the little kitchen on Bleecker Street of all the traditional dishes for this truly American holiday that was for everyone, like the Fourth of July was for everyone, not like Christmas or Easter, which were reserved for the Christians even if they acted like the whole country was welcome to be involved. Making a Thanksgiving dinner for themselves was one of the ways the Auerbach sisters had tried to be Americans so long ago in their tiny room on Essex Street. Twice they had made a boiled chicken and something approximating a mince pie on the gas ring in their room, in the two years they had together as greenhorns working so hard, having so much fun, making themselves into regular Americans.

When, throughout her childhood, Rebecca helped Esther with the mince pie every year, Esther would always give her a little ball of dough with which to roll out a baby pie of her own, and as Rebecca crimped the top crust over a spoonful of mince, Esther would usually sigh the same sigh and tell her again that hers was just like those little Thanksgiving pies that her sister had made for them in the sink, with raisins soaked in wine and bits of stale bread in a plain dough that was very tough because they couldn’t use lard, which was trayfe, and who had money for butter when they had spent it all on the scrawny chicken? Rebecca believed her little pies provided a requisite symbolism, like Elijah’s glass of wine on the seder table, an offering for the absent guest. In her adult life, whenever she baked a pie, which was infrequent, although her apple pie was especially competent (the secret ingredient was a shot of Jack Daniels over the apples), she always made an extra little one, and she would give a thought to Pauline’s improvised mince dumplings on Essex Street so long ago. Only these days George would usually eat what he called her fractal pie in two bites before it was cool.

George reached across the booth and felt one of her biceps appreciatively, grunting, “Mmm. Strong woman, able to lift gold ingot. I like strong woman. Strong woman bring home secret family gold ingot.”

“Interesting fantasy. More likely her top secret borscht and noodle kugel recipes, and oh, I don’t know, old insurance papers.”

“How was her kugel?”

“It weighed you down for the week. Sometimes it was in my school lunch. Along with the thermoses of goulash and the tins of sardines that marked me as a freak next to those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches everyone else had. There was this girl, Arlene, who always had grape jelly sandwiches on white bread. I thought they looked like wounds, but I was desperately jealous of her odor-free lunch. Nobody wanted to sit near me on those goulash and sardine days.”