I just stare at her. How can she — how can any of them — be thinking about regular life?

The house is echoing and silent,

somehow dim and foreboding even though it’s the middle of the day, and my mother and sisters are here, too. Which makes the eerie, deafening silence so… loud.

I’m itching to get back into Abba’s study, to see for myself whether the men have been here. What they’ve done, taken. Was there even anything left to take?

But Ima’s here, and even as I wonder if I’d be able to get the keys and get into the study without her noticing, she turns to me with a small smile that seems painfully stretched over her face, and says, “Well, Yair, do you want to go to yeshivah?”

Go to yeshivah. Now?

“No,” I say, without thinking. Seriously? Abba dies, shivah’s over, and that’s it? Slide back into ballgames and yeshivah hock and guys going crazy over farhers and stuff like that?

I can’t imagine going back to school. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

Yeah, right.

I know that’s not happening, but… not today.

“Tomorrow, then,” Ima says, sounding too hopeful.

I just stare at her. How can she — how can any of them — be thinking about regular life?

“Rikki and Tehillah are going back to school now,” Ima says. “And then Zaidy and Bubby will be coming over. So I figured if you wanted to go, I can drop you off, too.”

“No,” I say again. It’s like it’s the only word I have left, a visceral, instinctive response to the will of the world that we just pick up and restart life.

It’s funny but even though I hated it some of the time, now I just want to sit in the dining room again and have people file in, strangers and older men and even my awkward, stammering classmates. So there were far too many murmured platitudes and people saying nothing in particular, the occasional inquisitive guest who asked too many questions about what happened, as if I even understood it myself (A heart attack? But Abba was so young!).

But even with all the annoying parts… it was something, proclaiming to the whole world that something big and terrible has happened and life will never be the same. A week just to sit and talk about Abba, because that’s what we were supposed to do.