“I’ve always found that shared values are more important than common interests,” she said. “People bond over a love of football or classical music or whatever, but studies show that hobbies are a terrible indicator of long-term compatibility. We covered it my social psych courses.”
“Who said anything about long-term?”
Naomi lowered her chin and gave him a look. “You’re a rabbi in his thirties.”
“So?”
“The rabbi part means you’re responsible and you like taking care of people.” She reached over absently and straightened his tie. Ethan hoped she couldn’t detect the flurry of his heartbeat. “And the thirties part means you understand your biological imperative to breed.”
He supposed he had signed up for this kind of analysis when he recruited her, albeit reluctantly, to find him a date. Still, he wished shehadn’t said the wordbreed. He shifted in his seat against an inconvenient tightening in his pants.
“You asked for this,” Naomi said, reminding him in the face of his discomfort.
“I had a feeling you’d already sized me up anyway,” Ethan admitted.
“You’re easier than most.” Naomi’s voice wasn’t unkind. “You wear your emotions on your sleeve.”
Well, he couldn’t argue with that. Ethan had learned long ago that his feelings didn’t care whether he found them at all convenient. They made themselves known. He might as well face them headfirst. Better than letting them take him out at the knees.
“Let’s start with the basics.” Naomi hopped up to write on the recently cleaned whiteboard. “You have to marry someone Jewish.” She scrawled the imperative.
“It certainly makes it easier if the person is Jewish,” Ethan acknowledged.
“Family-oriented.” She kept writing as she spoke. “I saw you with Leah. You want someone who cares about keeping family close.”
“I love Leah and my mom,” he agreed, “and I spend as much time with them as I can, butfamilyhas a lot of definitions. I would never disqualify someone because they weren’t close to their parents or siblings. Sometimes people don’t have a choice.”
Naomi pushed her hair out of her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Well, my dad’s dead.” He’d said the words before, many times even, but always they felt as wrong in his mouth as they did in his head.
“Shit.” Naomi took a step toward him and then, almost immediately, two steps back. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
Ethan forced himself to smile, because she looked so worried, so serious, and he wanted her to relax. “It’s okay,” he said, and found that today it was closer to being true than the last time he’d said it.
She wrung her hands for a moment. “When did he die?”
“Six years ago. Cancer,” Ethan said so she didn’t have to ask the second question. Normally that was the end of the conversation. He might wear his emotions on his sleeve, but he didn’t like to splash around in his grief.
“It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.” At the time, it had been the worst thing he could imagine. “My dad was my compass. The reason anything in the world made sense. And when he was gone, nothing mattered anymore. My teaching job didn’t matter. My friends didn’t matter.”
Since he’d become a rabbi, his work had exposed him to so much suffering. But anguish wasn’t something you could build up a tolerance to. Increased exposure didn’t stop Ethan from closing his eyes against the memories of his father, sick and suffering. How many times had Ethan wished he could take up the doctor’s scalpel and carve out his dad’s pain from his own skin? Pound for pound. Flesh for flesh. It was a macabre recollection. Naomi didn’t need to hear it.
“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve,” she said. Her hair was falling out of her hasty bun. He drank in its downfall against her cheeks.
“I tried to run from it.” He’d booked a plane ticket as soon as shiva had ended. “I left everything—everyone—here. Went to Brooklyn to stay with my cousins, because it was the farthest place from L.A. with a couch to crash on.”
“What did you find in Brooklyn?”
“Well, I ended up teaching Sunday school at my cousin’s shul. They needed people, and I had classroom experience and no other job. I didn’t tell them that I’d barely practiced in years. It was classic. I’d left L.A. to escape memories from my childhood, memories of my dad, but then I had no choice but to paw through them, searching for scraps of language and memories of rituals I’d forgotten. All of it covered with his fingerprints.”
“You had to put yourself back together from the fragmented piecesof your former life.” Naomi crossed her arms, and he had the distinct impression she was trying to hold in her emotions, giving his words space.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“It’s hard,” she said, like she knew.
In an auditorium with forty-foot ceilings, their shared experiences became magnetic, pulling them together.