I looked again at her face to see if my knowledge of her secret had caused her any discomfort

“Look at all this space!” I announced, my arms extended, making invisible circles around me. “We need furniture!”

We were standing in our new, expansive apartment in Buffalo, New York, where we were to begin our new lives after having spent the first year and a bit of our marriage in a sweet but pokey little apartment in Crown Heights.

My husband — Shmuel Yosef — nodded, but in his eyes, I could detect rapid and intense calculations.

You see, we were raised to go out into the big, wide world of shlichus. But, as everyone knows, Chabad Houses often run on a shoestring budget. Buffalo was no exception. There was a school — where we were to serve as teachers — a shul, a community center, a mikveh, and that was it. There would be no extra money. Certainly, there would be no allowance for the prettification of our fresh, new living quarters.

Still, the moment we took possession of our roomy Buffalo apartment, it became all too evident that we needed furniture. I had not realized how sparse our possessions would look in our new, comfortable, and commodious rooms.

Finally, one Sunday morning we had the time to go furniture shopping. The sky hung low and dismal, a dull gray pocked with dark magenta; a steady rain fell, the kind that was not going to stop all day. Still, we had the motivation, and the verve. After an early lunch, we bundled our baby — Chaim Moshe — into the car and set out.

We had no idea where we were going. This was before GPS. We simply drove in the general direction of “Downtown.” Wherever that was.