For one second, an avalanche of questions: What would Ahrele do? Where would he go? Could he ever go back to the way things were? And from there?

"It’s not okay.”

He shuts the door and takes the three flights of stairs down to the street, past the houses of Batei Ungarin, up, toiling up, through Geula.

“Not everything is, you know,” he calls back to the street of dirty-white stone.

He shouldn’t have been home. He shouldn’t have been there when Ruchelle fell, that old chair leg breaking clean in half beneath her. He should’ve had his own home by now, his own set of chairs.

Past Malchus Wachsberger and H Bagel and Hayad Hashni’ah Furniture.

He scowls. Mamme said it’s fine. She’d felt Ruchelle’s arm, definitely not a fracture. The chair was okay, one less, what did it matter? And if it did, Hashem yaazor, they’d find the money, they’d have what they needed. That’s the hard bit, that she’s so okay — when it isn’t okay. So maddeningly accepting. S’iz gut, azoi gut.

For once, just once, Ahrele needs her not to be calm and placid as a lake. He needs her to be a river, angry, rushing over boulders, charting her destiny. Not just pooling around the rocks, letting her struggles shape her.

Tzivia the almuneh. Tzivia the gutte.

It’s not always okay.

He plunks down three shekels on the wooden counter of Pitzuchei Mashiach’s open display.

“Papitas, ken?”

He nods.

“Mah od, chabibi?”

He shrugs and is off, the brittle salted seeds between his teeth.

Half a bag later, he’s there, atop the hill. The land of the Amerikayim.

Snatches of English on the breeze. Couples and kids and ice coffees and blue slushes, ten minutes and a world away from the gold kaftans and faded housedresses. He stops to catch his breath near a wall, wondering at the people.

They’d come here to Jerusalem. So many of them. And he thought, in his childhood dreams, that he’d go there. Get away, make his fortune, do everything his parents hadn’t done. They’d never left the land. Tatte had lived out his forty-two years, barely ever leaving Meah Shearim. Mamme spent all day in the apartment in Batei Ungarin, talking to those who sought her counsel.

Once he’d been friends with Shmulik and Baruch, dreaming and scheming together. They’d both gone to America. Shmulik at the end of one hard yeshivah year, and Baruch as a chassan. The rest of his yeshivah crowd were married — most of them. Probably fathers as well; he tried not to keep track.

He leans against the wall, picks absently at the signs. Shmulik, when he came back for Succos, was full of stories of offices and gvirim. Baruch married there and never came back. But he, Ahrele, was still here, knocking around the kollel, doing this job or that, not quite an alter bocher, but close enough. What was it with him? That he never had the guts? Or his parent’s conviction — maybe it went deeper than he knew?

A small “For Rent” sign comes off the wall in his hand. He tries to tack it back among the other notices for dirahs probably long rented out.

Maybe he should be an apartment broker, like every other young man in the city. He sighs and scans the other notices.

The names of the dead live on the wall. His own father’s name was there for too many weeks. In the corner, he sees a notice. Looking for a live-in aide for an older man in Romema. Good pay for the right candidate.

Hmm. Inevitably, he thinks of Zeide, living in their home for twenty years. Outliving Tatte. When Ahrele was eight or nine years old, he’d help Zeide get dressed, take him down the stairs, help him in shul. He can do this.

He dials the number.

A woman answers. “When can you come for an interview?” she asks him.

Interview, well. “Now?”