“Do you know what happened when I made this fancy dinner? Made, mind you, not bought. Yisroel started legit analyzing the ingredients!”

NSTEMI. A partial artery blockage. Only a mild heart attack. Only.

Ayala clenched her hands in her lap. The Kramers — new Chesed Tzirel clients — sat across from her. The young mother was chattering nervously while her husband stared silently into space, as they waited for the doctor to call them in to discuss their daughter’s MRI results. But Ayala’s mind was thousands of miles away, in a different hospital.

What is Mommy’s doctor telling her? Is anyone sitting with her, to explain what’s going on? Tatty was there, but he was probably just getting frustrated at the medical staff and adding to the tension. And Zev, of course. He’d raced over, he said, as soon as he’d gotten the call; he’d been on his way home from work and, the way he described it, made such a sharp U-turn he nearly crashed into a traffic pole.

She was thankful Zev lived close enough to come to her parents’ aid. Even more, she was grateful that in all her years living in Israel, she could count on one hand the times her brother had ever complained or made her feel guilty over her distance. (And one of those had technically come from her sister-in-law, and Zev had apologized afterward for his wife’s snideness.) He was a good guy, her brother.

The problem was, if she had to choose who she’d want to be managing her parents’ medical crisis, it wouldn’t be him. It would be someone who knew how to be politely assertive with the staff rather than passively assuming things would be taken care of, who had enough of a grasp of the medical situation to know when such assertiveness was called for, and who knew to behave with the right mix of calm and compassion to allay her parents’ tendency to hysteria.

In other words, she thought with a twisted smile, she would choose herself.

She felt a nudge on her arm and looked up at Bracha, who was sitting next to her.

“Earth to Ayala,” she muttered.

Ayala blinked. The young mother was staring at her, looking hurt. “Sorry,” Ayala said quickly. “Did you — uh — just ask me something?”