Sunday had been agonizing, low voices and glares and every adult speaking in a too-loud voice, pretending that everything was fine for the kids’ sake. Rivi had slunk up to her room and stayed there for most of the day, avoiding the tension she’d left in her wake. Suri hasn’t spoken to her since. Neither has Ma, for that matter.

“I’ll fix it,” Rivi repeats, and she waits until Ezra has left the room before she calls Suri.

“Yes?” The voice on the other line is so sharp it could slice a diamond in two. Rivi winces.

“Hey, Suri,” she says, keeping her voice light. “I know it’s late notice, but I wanted to know if you’d want to come over Shabbos lunch. Clear the air a little.”

Silence. Rivi plunges on. “I know that there’s been… I know we don’t always get along, but the kids—”

“Don’t talk to me about the kids,” Suri hisses. “What is this? More tzedakah? Offer a meal to the Poor Greenbergs?”

Rivi mentally counts by multiples of nine to keep herself from lashing out. Eighteen. Twenty-seven. Thirty-six. “No. It’s just lunch.”

“How dare you,” Suri says furiously. “How dare you. You go behind my back and give my husband money, then lord it over me like you own me? I didn’t ask for your money! I don’t want your money! And you use it to humiliate me?”

Forty-five. Fifty-four. Sixty-three. “I shouldn’t have said anything at the meal. I was going through… I wasn’t feeling well, and I took it out on you. I’m sorry. We were just trying to help.”

“I’m sure you were.” Suri’s voice is caustic. “Because you’re always so helpful.” She laughs. “Ezra is helpful. Ezra is so easygoing and nice that he probably didn’t think twice about helping Avi.” Because Ezra, somehow, can do no wrong in the eyes of his family. Rivi loves her husband, is very grateful for all the ways that he is wonderful even when she isn’t, but she is getting very tired of being the villain of every story that Suri weaves.

“Don’t tell me that you weren’t using this as an excuse to laugh at me behind my back. To play me for some kind of clueless idiot.”

Seventy-two. Eighty-one. Ninety. Ninety-nine. “Of course I didn’t,” Rivi says hastily. “I never thought of it like that—”

“You absolutely did,” Suri scoffs. “People don’t just slip up and say things that they haven’t been thinking all along. And Rivi… you’ve always thought that you were better than me.”

One-oh-eight. One seventeen. One… one twenty-seven? Twenty-six? Rivi can feel her taut hold on serenity beginning to snap. “Really? Because from my end, it seems like you’ve spent years flaunting everything about your perfect life to me—”

“And nothing is more satisfying than seeing it collapse without me knowing?” Suri snarls. “Do you have any idea how many lines you’ve crossed? You don’t care, because you do whatever you feel like—”

One thirty-five? No. She needs to start over. Nine. Eighteen. Forget it. “I don’t see how I’m the bad guy here because your husband asked his brother for some help!”

“Of course. Ezra’s doing all the rest of the work in your house. He might as well take the blame, too.” Suri sounds smug, as though this is a victory on her part. Rivi is flushed and furious, her hand squeezing the phone so hard that she’s surprised it isn’t snapping apart. “No,” Suri says with sharp precision. “We will not be coming for Shabbos lunch.”

She cuts the line and leaves Rivi shaking with rage and frustration and defeat.

Eliana is more understanding when Rivi calls her. “I’ve tried to talk to Suri, but we’re not that close. I’ve always found her kind of intimidating,” she admits sheepishly. “And then Atara told me to stay out of it. She says it’s just between the two of you.”

But Atara has been ignoring Rivi’s texts, even the polite one where Rivi had asked for her Israeli salad recipe. She’s chosen her natural side as a Suri loyalist. Rivi didn’t bother to reach out to Chaya, who is perpetually busy with her kids and probably hasn’t noticed the rift in the family.

“I think you were doing the right thing,” Eliana admits meekly. “Just… maybe you shouldn’t have told everyone about it like that.”

“Maybe.” Rivi chokes out a little laugh. “Thanks, Eliana. But you really don’t need to get involved. Atara wasn’t wrong about that.” Eliana is better off not hitching her wagon to Rivi’s rapidly sinking one.

A part of Rivi is relieved. She’s a lawyer. That part finds comfort in conflict, in teetering on a precipice with no idea whether or not she’s going to fall. This is familiar, even if it hits close to home. Fighting with Suri is a part of life, and as long as Suri holds this against her, she won’t have any space in her mind to focus on the rest of her life.

Selfish. Suri’s anger isn’t a distraction. Suri’s anger is going to cause nothing but stress for Ezra and the rest of his family. But it’s so blessedly mundane, so free of all the insanity of the Cohen (not Cohen) family drama that Rivi would prefer to cling to it forever, to be resented and hated and to stress over that instead of thinking about Abba.

Don’t think about Abba.

She exits the kitchen, fingers still white-knuckled around her phone, and says, “Suri will not be coming for Shabbos.”

Ezra sighs from his spot on the couch. “I didn’t think so. Avi is sorry, by the way.”

“And annoyed, I’m sure.”

“Maybe a little. But he should have talked to Suri long before you did,” Ezra says loyally.

Rivi busies herself with picking up couch pillows and magazines from the floor. The boys are downstairs and the girls are asleep, thankfully, so there is no one else to ask questions about the family tension.

Or not.

“What happened with Suri and Avi?” Gabe asks from the other couch. He’s staring at a stack of printouts, studying one so intently that Rivi hadn’t noticed him until now. “Did Suri finally manage to slip some poison into your potato kugel on Shabbos?” He grins impishly at Rivi. Rivi rolls her eyes at him, but Ezra laughs.

“I think she wishes she did. What are those papers?” he asks curiously, easily deflecting Gabe’s query.

Gabe darts a shifty glance at Rivi. Rivi does not want to think about Gabe’s terrible investigation. She doesn’t want Ezra to be thinking about it, either. “If it’s another article about some lost treasures of the Beis Hamikdash—” she says instead, and turns, conspiratorial, to embarrass her little brother in front of her husband. “He used to spend all his time reading about this stuff. He’d print every article about that stone—”

“The onyx stone! It might’ve been from the Choshen!” Gabe sets the papers down, facing downward. “It was interesting.”

“It absolutely was,” Ezra agrees, because of course he’s just as fascinated as Gabe had been. Rivi shakes her head at both of them. “I tell my students about it. And the missing artifacts.”

“See? Your husband understands me,” Gabe says significantly. “The machatzis hashekel.”

“Mordechai’s signet ring. Allegedly. Both of them missing for decades. Every yeshivah kid I know went through a lost treasures phase.” Ezra leans back against the couch. “I used to dream of digging up one of them in my backyard. Ma did not love it when I ruined her flowerbed.” He looks sheepish. “When I was in middle school, after the onyx was found, I used to dream of being some kind of detective who would hunt the other pieces down.”

“I wanted to be an archeologist because of them.” Gabe leans forward, and Rivi entertains the thought that, perhaps, her brother isn’t as much of a sore thumb as she’d always assumed.

Then again, Ezra outgrew the obsession and became a rebbi. Gabe had gone on to anthropology. He’s still pretty strange. But she finds herself very fond of both of them. “I remember the time you thought that you’d found the ring in some British museum,” she offers.

“The British Museum.” Gabe says it with the imperious snobbery of an academic.

“They only have one?” Rivi arches her eyebrows until Gabe notices that she’s pulling his leg. “Anyway, Gabe tries calling up the museum every day for a week to tell them that one of their Greek sculptures is wearing a ring that’s definitely Mordechai’s. He ran up an insane long-distance bill leaving them messages. Abba didn’t know what to—”

She stops short. Don’t think about Abba. Don’t think about the papers that Gabe is holding. She knows that he’s been investigating on his own, digging up old secrets and leaving her blissfully ignorant.

When Ezra yawns and says, “Well, it’s late. I’m going to get the boys. We can worry about my family drama tomorrow,” Rivi is gripped with dread. She doesn’t want to hear about any of Gabe’s investigations, to give him any indication that he should fill her in. Ezra’s presence might be the only thing keeping Gabe from flipping over the papers in his hands and showing them to Rivi.

But when Ezra departs, Gabe only leans forward and says, “Rivi, Hillel and I were going to work on Abba’s house a little more on Sunday afternoon. Do you want to make a day of it? Bring the kids and Ezra and see if we can make some headway on the old basement?”

“I don’t want them to see the house,” Rivi says immediately. She can imagine Shimmy, wide-eyed and afraid. But it’s so dark and creepy here! Meir, gentle and insightful, learning more about his mother’s past than he should ever know. The twins, covered in dust and grime.

Gabe considers that. He glances at the papers on his lap and then at Rivi with a measured look, and Rivi notices — he has grown up, even if he still gets lost in old legends. He isn’t just her baby brother anymore, but a man who sees right through her. “All our old toys are in the basement,” he says gently. “Our old books and games. That’s all they’ll see. And you know that they’ll love it.”

Rivi tries to imagine the house again through her children’s eyes, this time more charitably. Abba used to keep her well-supplied in dolls that Shira and Blimi would love. Shimmy will have a great time with Gabe’s old Boxcar Children books. Meir would be thrilled to take Gabe’s old makeshift Lego sculptures home.

“Okay,” she says, and she thinks about it one more time. About what Ezra has already seen in her old house and what other exposed pieces of her past he might find.

If Abba’s life had been a slow climb to the top of a mountain, his death had been the moment at the peak when they’d all slipped off, hurtling downward with no direction or safety gear or brakes. And Rivi can try to conceal the worst of it, but there is nothing that can stop it fully.

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 912)