After that, she lost all sense of structure. All the boundaries fell away, all the definitions. Inside. Outside. Reality. Imagination. Time. Mind. Body.

Shua was right.

All morning, Nechami wonders if she can find the nerve to speak to Ruti’s mother, or to the wife of the ex-brother-in-law from Shua’s kollel. Her ruminations are interrupted now and then with thoughts about the family fundraising drive, but Tovi’s surgery isn’t really her focus. She does send a polite email to Odelia, and Odelia replies that she’d be happy to donate 500 shekels.

Midday brings a wintry sun out from between the clouds, doing its best to dry the pavements after yesterday’s heavy rain. The children ask to go out and play. They’re not the only ones; the street is teeming with tricycles, bikes, and speeding scooters.

Nechami is still wondering. Should I approach her mother? Would it be indiscreet?

She calls Shua at the tail end of lunch break. “Would it be totally insensitive to speak to the mother, to find out what really happened to Ruti?”

“Why would you need to?” he says. “I already told you about it.”

“I need to,” she says.

“So ask her, then.”

“But it would be so insensitive of me.”

“No, it wouldn’t. You know how to do things delicately,” Shua says. “People like sharing with you.”

Pink from the compliment, she ends the call and turns to find Yossi and his friend Raphael Naaman waving euphorically from their shared riding toy, zooming full speed ahead into the biggest puddle in the street.

How do we know that time moves forward? Ruti’s question has been boring into her brain like a woodpecker. Trk, trk, trk. What a ridiculous question! If yesterday was yesterday, and today is today, then obviously time moves forward, no?

The new neighbor — Ruti’s mother — appears from around a bend in the street. She’s hunched, overloaded with bags from the vegetable store.

“Maybe I’ll go and help her?” Nechami suggests to Chana Naaman.

“Go ahead, I’ll keep an eye on the kids,” Chana says.

Nechami approaches the older woman. “Please, let me take some of those bags,” she offers.

“Thank you!” The neighbor smiles warmly and hands her the apples, oranges, and pomelos. “I thought I’d manage, but all of it together… turned out to be a little too heavy for me.”

“Give me a little more,” says Nechami, reaching for a bag of sweet potatoes.

They make it to the steps of the neighboring building and there Nechami puts her special talent to work (Dudi complains about it all the time: “I’m just as charming as you, but I can’t get people talking the way you can!”), and their chitchat gently drifts in the direction she wants.

Ruti, her mother says, dreamed of being a science teacher. She hoped to get her certification in a new program that had just launched in Yerushalayim. But that hadn’t worked out — it was too far from the little development where she lived. And too expensive. And too hard. The day care job was only supposed to be temporary, until the science teacher courses became more widely available.

And then…?