I only had a few minutes before they were ready—and really, what good is a cold latke?—but I needed to make a quick call. “It’s bad,” I said. “How bad?” asked Irene. “Bad,” I repeated. “He can barely talk and he looks awful.” I told her about the rabbi’s stammering, his shoddy appearance, how he cried. She listened, without interrupting to ask questions. While I talked on my parents’ cordless phone, I played with the plastic dreidel Mrs. Goldfarb had given me that afternoon, spinning it on my desk and taking note of how it fell. Nun. Nun. Gimel. Nun. Shin. I had kept Irene up to date by phone for a solid week, relating whatever Mrs. Goldfarb told me about the rabbi’s condition. During that time, Irene had never once pressured me to visit him, nor had she ever asked why I wanted to stay away. As someone who knew how it felt to be snubbed by the rabbi, to be drawn closer only to be pushed away, she probably understood my feelings better than anyone else. But as I sat at the desk in my old bedroom in my parents’ house, barely an hour after I first saw the rabbi in the hospital, I found that my feelings had changed.
