Half an hour after Zevi left the house, Zalman and Minda got ready to leave as well.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us, Chasi?” her father asked again. “The store is not all that busy. We can close it for three days.”

“Thanks, Abba,” Chasida replied as she thumbed through the daily paper. “But I prefer to stay home. I know that Yitzchak and Faigy would be happy to have me, but I really want to stay here.”

“Something secret going on here that I don’t know about?” Her mother laughed as she ran a brush through her short gray wig. She examined her reflection in the mirror. “You’ll rest well, Chasida’le, won’t you? And eat what I left you in the refrigerator. You won’t do anything silly, will you?”

“I won’t.” Chasida put the paper down on the couch, but it slipped to the floor; she didn’t bother to bend over to pick it up. Only after a few seconds of silence, broken just by the sound of her mother’s rubber soles pattering around the house, did Chasida pick up the paper.

“What should I tell Mrs. Kurzman, Ima? Do you have an idea for me?”

“Kurzman?” Minda paused in mid-reach for the purple overnight bag. “What, she got back to you?”

“Yes, a while ago.”

“And she has something good for you?” Minda sat down on the edge of the sofa tiredly.

“Blum.” Chasida was terse. “She’s trying again.”

“When?”

“I don’t remember anymore…” Chasida opened the paper across her lap once more, but her eyes were on her mother. “Meanwhile she hasn’t called again. So what do I tell her?”

“She called you about him three weeks ago, right?”

“Around then, yes. We met on the bus. How do you know?”

“Because you’ve been out of sorts and distracted since then,” her mother said softly. “Right, Zalman? Right I told you that something happened to Chasida?”

Zalman held his hat and gazed at it for a few long moments. Then he said, “Yes, you did tell me. So, what do you think, Minda?” Keep Reading…

Only after the bus finally pulled out of the bus stop did Zevi allow himself to relax on the brown and blue patterned seat. He was on the way home, and he had made the bus, even though Savta had been sure he was going to miss it.

His blue tote bag on the seat beside him almost fell as the bus lurched into the next stop—which Zevi remembered as being the last. He pushed the tote back a bit and rested his hand on it, expecting someone to ask him to sit in the seat any second. But no one did. Just two families boarded and found seats other than the one next to him. Zevi leaned back, one hand on his bag and the other on the window pane, which rumbled with the rhythm of the bus’s turning wheels. Small rays of sun bounced off his freckled forearm, but they didn’t warm him at all.

Savta had said he was better off taking his bag onto the bus, and not putting it into the luggage compartment. “Someone could steal it, you know,” she had warned him as he was about to walk out of the house, two minutes after he had hung up with his mother. “And people taking their things off the bus could knock it out by mistake, and it will be left on the road.”

He really didn’t want to take the risk of getting home without his belongings. In all honesty, Zevi could not recall the last time he had lost something, if at all.

In fourth grade, the rebbi had announced to the class at the end of the year that the only one who hadn’t forgotten a notebook or lost a pencil, eraser, book, or his food the whole year, was Zevi Bloch. Some of Zevi’s childhood nightmares were about him forgetting notebooks at home, not finding things, and not having a pen to use, because everything had disappeared from his drawers. But these dreams were odd, because Zevi’s drawers were the neatest in the whole house, and he would carefully prepare what he needed for the next day on the evening before.

“Too careful,” his father would say when he was home, while lovingly pinching the freckled cheek. Once he had asked his son, “What will happen if you forget a pencil once in a while?” Keep Reading…

At three o’clock, as the pale moon began to sink below the horizon, Eliyahu woke up and could not fall back asleep. For many long years he had slept, very deeply. Now the time had come to act, and with him, as always, action didn’t come far after the decision, even if it was difficult or puzzling. Perhaps the fact that Zevi was reasonably tall was what was bothering him. That was a sign that he was toward the end of the growing stage, wasn’t it? And if he had understood Arthur correctly, it was easier to repair the problem when the body had not yet reached its final growth. Perhaps these were the final days when something could still be done, if at all!

And maybe it was his impulsiveness, which had never given him any respite. His Aunt Minda had always said that the moment he decided something, nothing could stop him.

Either way, Eliyahu felt that he had to act. He couldn’t wait, despite the discomfort and awkwardness he knew would be involved. He waited impatiently for another hour to pass, and then got up and went out to the nearest shul where a vasikin minyan was held. He learned a bit, davened, and went back home. Chavi and the girls were up, as they usually were at this early hour. Only the boys’ room was still quiet. Elchanan had to get up for davening already, but he had an alarm clock. He didn’t need his father to wake him. Eliyahu marveled at how mature and responsible the boy was.

“Chavi?” He found her in the kitchen, cutting tomatoes on the blue cutting board as she listened with a sigh to the screams coming from the girls’ room. “Do you know how someone can get from Bnei Brak to Yerucham?”

“From Bnei Brak to Yerucham?” The knife in her hand froze in mid-motion for a second. “I think there are private buses a few times a day. Not too many.”

“Is there a direct bus from here?”

“I don’t think so. I imagine that you can take a bus from the Central Bus Station to Beer Sheva, and from there I’m sure there’s a link to Yerucham.” Keep reading…

Gavriel hadn’t even gotten to “Borei me’orei ha’eish”when the phone began to ring. One ring, followed by another and another. Shevi picked up the receiver, waited the few requisite seconds until the caller would realize that Havdalah was being recited, and then hung up.

Gavriel had hardly finished drinking and making the brachah acharonah when the phone began to ring again. This time, Shevi was at the sink with her hands deep in the suds, so he answered the call.

“Yes, Ima,” Shevi heard him say. “Oh, was it you before? We were just making Havdalah.” He listened for a minute with the familiar expression on his face, and Shevi’s heart sank. “A waste of a call? For who?” He was quiet again. “Oh, we really never thought about it like that. In a lot of places they do this; it’s so that the caller will know that we can’t speak right now.”

Elinor tactfully slipped out of the kitchen. Keep Reading…

Chasida’s father was outside talking to a salesman, while Chasida was inside handling an eight-year-old customer whose mother had sent her to buy a bottle of rosemary oil. The girl, however, was sure that the item she needed was one of the bottles of flaxseed oil on the next shelf over.

“My mother showed me the empty bottle,” the girl insisted. “This is exactly what it looked like, really!” A few long minutes passed until the stubborn little girl agreed to take the bottle Chasida was offering her.

Is stubbornness an acquired trait or an inborn one? Chasida wasn’t quite sure.

The salesman walked into the store, followed by Mr. Dresnick. “Just sign here and I’ll be on my way,” the tall man said, placing a medium-sized box on the counter. “Do you want a few samples of this, too?”

“What is it?” Mr. Dresnick asked.

“A new cream from Goren to treat localized burns.”

The older man’s eyes automatically shifted to his daughter, who had suddenly become very busy sorting the small change in the cash register. The clink of the coins was the only sound that broke the silence.

“So?” The salesman’s patience was wearing thin.

“I don’t think so,” Zalman hastily replied. “What do you say, Chasida?”

A few single shekel coins fell under the counter, giving Chasida reason to disappear behind it. When she stood up, she blinked rapidly and answered distractedly. “What?”

“Should we take Goren’s cream?”

“To treat burns?”

Her father nodded. She didn’t respond, and the salesman, getting sick of watching this peculiar exchange, interjected, “If you don’t want it, just say no. Please sign here for the delivery, without the cream.” Keep Reading…