An inner voice says, “Why don’t you listen to your children singing, instead of obsessing over ancient history like a broken record?”

I took the bus to school. On my way out I checked the area around the mailboxes to make sure there wasn’t any suspicious-looking leaflet. There was one about 17 orphans getting married in Shevat, but that was all. The street was wet, and streams of water from last night’s rain were turning the leaflets into pulp.

It was Erev Shabbos and I came home early, straight into a whirl of preparations. There was no time to talk, or think, or feel sorry for myself. I had to get my little sisters showered and put away all the clean laundry. Chaimke and Ima were braiding challahs and laughing together about something. I flew around like a drone from one room to the next, putting piles of socks and tights from the laundry baskets into their designated places.

This is the chore everyone in this house hates. They don’t mind watching Chumi and Suri, bathing them, or washing sticky baking utensils — but for some reason sorting the socks is too much for them. Chaimke claims he can’t tell the difference between socks and tights. Tzvia’le says she doesn’t read numbers well enough, as if you have to read numbers to know which tights are size 6–8 and which are 12–14. And Mordechai just avoids it without giving any reason. He takes a pair of socks for himself from the baskets, and that’s it.

Abba was following me around. He tried to make it look natural, and the more he tried, the more I felt like a planet with a moon revolving around it. When I was out in the laundry room, he suddenly had to get some shoe polish from the closet there. When I opened the drawer to put away my little sisters’ tights, he had to check if the window in that room was properly sealed.

“Abba,” I said.

“What?” He turned and looked at me.

“I’m all right.” I knew he needed to be reassured. I thought of that young mother, the older sister of those two girls, who had just given birth to a baby without an ear, like me. Abba was really young when I was born, 25, I think. How did he feel then? We never talked about it. Abba and Ima always liked to talk about how cute I was, like they do about all of us kids. And I knew about the doctor who told Ima and got her all upset, and how she started crying, but as soon as they put me in her arms, she knew — she didn’t think, she knew — I was the most beautiful, adorable baby in the world, and she didn’t need to cry at all.

But what about Abba?

I looked at him, troubled. “When I was born,” I said, “what were you then?”

“I was a young avreich. And I was very happy that now I had a son and a daughter.”

“For real?” I knew he was lying. He must have been upset. I bet he almost fainted, and they had to bring a social worker to talk to him, and a doctor to give him an injection of something to calm him down. That’s how it always is in the stories.

“For real.”

“And when they told you about… me… it didn’t bother you?”