“I’m back! What can I say? I missed you guys too much!” Dini grinned at the wild applause

Penina’s garden was crowded when Ayala walked in for the CT Volunteers meeting, which she supposed was a good thing, considering she’d had nightmares of no one showing up.

This entire business of planning the meeting had taken up much more time than she’d bargained for, which didn’t augur well for the next two weeks, as Naftali had pointed out when he’d found her sitting up at two a.m. working furiously on her speech.

“If you work with your patients during the day and do campaign stuff at night, when, exactly, do you plan on sleeping?” he’d yawned.

Simply settling on a meeting place had been a headache in itself. The CT Volunteer headquarters, apparently, was in Dini’s spacious apartment. Even if they were willing to drive out to Ramat Beit Shemesh, fitting 25 women in her living room would be a tight squeeze. And, face it, none of them were willing.

So despite the fact that they all surely lived in miniscule newlywed apartments, she’d desperately asked the volunteers if any of them could host, and a girl named Penina had gotten permission to use her landlord’s garden.

So here Ayala was, feeling as self-conscious as a teenager on her first day of high school. She was wearing a twins-approved outfit, though Layale had declared her sheitel a bit too rebbetziny for the young American crowd, pointing out that Dini’s was longer and swingier. Ayala had snorted at that, but now she found herself looking at everyone else’s sheitel. Annoyed at herself, she turned with relief to find Bracha standing next to her.

“I thought you said you couldn’t find a babysitter!”

“I stole your Tziri. I figured my moral support was worth more to you than a functional bedtime in the Wexler home.”

“What a friend you are,” she said, squeezing Bracha’s hand.

“And what a crazy woman you are. You’ll meet with the world’s top doctors without batting an eyelash, but a bunch of twenty-year-old schnooks gives you a panic attack?”