She really doesn’t know who in this house would have such particles of science, such bits of biology, in their possession

“Did you know that Dudi raised almost the whole amount Gedalya needs for Tovi’s surgery?” Nechami asks Ima. She picks up the receipt lying on the table — it’s from the sheitelmacher, for Chaya’s sheitel —turns it over, and writes “NIS 185,000” on the back, underlining it with a flourish. “The family fundraising drive was his idea. He coordinated everything, and he raised so much money.”

Nechami piles it on. She has to get Ima to see that Dudi is a good person, that he cares, that he does mitzvos.

“In my Torah, the one I learned when I stood at Har Sinai, it doesn’t say you have to wear baggy black pants and a white shirt,” he’d said to her yesterday. “It does say a lot about chesed and tzedakah, though.”

Nechami hadn’t let that go by without reminding him of what he already knew: all about communal codes of dress and conduct and how they keep a person anchored, and what a zechus it is to live by defined standards…. But now, when she’s in Ima’s house, she focuses on all the good Dudi has done for Gedalya.

“I need that receipt,” Ima says, taking the slip of paper, turning it over again, and putting it back in the folder that Chaya has decorated with delicate swirls of 3D glitter paint. It’s where she’s keeping all the lists, bills, and receipts for the wedding.

“A week from now, right after the wedding, we’ll transfer the whole amount to the medical center,” Dudi had told Nechami yesterday. “Don’t you think that’s a very big mitzvah? Is it a smaller mitzvah than wearing a long black coat, or censoring ads in the Mehadhed?”

“Would you please stop advocating for Dudi?” Ima says now. “It’s very nice he’s helping Gedalya. But that doesn’t make him…”

Doesn’t make him what?

A strange, coiled object is sitting on the kitchen shelf. Nechami knows what it is. She runs a hand over it.

“Maybe you know where that came from?” says Ima. “Angela found it behind the radiator when she was cleaning there.”

“I dunno,” Nechami murmurs, playing dumb as she stares at the little plastic model of a DNA molecule, its two strands entwined in a double helix. She made a simulation like this herself in 3ds Max.

But she really doesn’t know who in this house would have such particles of science, such bits of biology, in their possession.