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kill you. John Wosileski’s father signaled he was done eating by pushing his plate away.
    While his mother washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, her husband drank a Schlitz beer straight from the can—hair of the dog—and then turned to his son. “So when are you going to give up that pansy job of yours and come work with me?”
    “I like what I do,” John Wosileski said. “It’s a good job.”
    His father got up, beer in hand, and left the table.
    His mother dried the frying pan.
     
    The women, the Catholic women, who had emerged from the church to congregate on the sidewalk, had their heads covered. Not the way the Orthodox Jews covered their heads with hats or schmattes or even wigs that you could spot from a mile off. These women wore delicate squares of lace draped over the crowns of their heads. The grown-up women wore mostly black lace, like mantillas from Spain. The young girls all wore white lace like the paper doilies Miriam put between the cake and the plate when she served company. They looked so lovely, these Catholic women, with that lace, it’s not impossible that Valentine felt a twinge of envy.
    At school, while changing for gym class, the way a toddler reaches for a butterfly, Valentine once reached out to finger the powder-blue enameled medal of Mary that Theresa Falco wore on a fragile silver chain around her neck, and the way Valentine went dumb at the lights at Christmastime—not so much the green and red lights, but the white ones, those little white lights strung on bare trees so that they looked like tiny icicles—it was as if they stole her faculties away. After having sighted a pair of nuns she was moved to ask her mother, “Don’t you think it’s romantic, the way they give up their lives for God?” to which Miriam said, “Romantic? No. Meshugge? Yes.”
    Given that her name, Valentine, was a saint’s name, coupled with the fact she did look exactly like the Mary on the prayer card,it wouldn’t have been far-fetched for Valentine to wonder if maybe there’d been some kind of celestial mix-up, maybe she was supposed to be a Catholic.
    But to so much as wonder such a thing, if she had so much as wondered such a thing, would be to betray her mother, her grandparents, her ancestors, and all the Jews, and hadn’t they been through enough? Valentine had read The Diary of Anne Frank . She’d heard plenty about how the Jews suffered, from the very beginning, about the Pharaoh and then the Cossacks and then Auschwitz; Miriam left out nothing. “We were chosen to suffer,” Miriam explained. “Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. But we were, and so we try to make the best of it. Supposedly, it’s a gift from God, to be a Jew.” And a gift from God is likely to come with a policy: No Refunds, No Exchanges.
     
    Joanne Clarke transferred the chocolate-chip cookies from the white bakery bag into a plastic baggie. A nod to the authenticity of the claim of homemade, that plastic baggie.
    Crossing from the kitchen to her bedroom, she passed by her father, who was watching television. A golf tournament, maybe. Or Bowling for Dollars . Who knew? Who cared? Certainly not her father, who could’ve been watching little green men land on Flatbush Avenue for all he was aware. And Joanne didn’t give an owl’s hoot what he watched as long as he was quiet and remembered to get up and go to the bathroom if he had to pee.
    Although she was only twenty-six years old, which was still young in most anybody’s book, based on her life thus far, Joanne Clarke had concluded that John Wosileski was her last chance atsomething which resembled happiness. She had a lot riding on cookies.
     
    Valentine found Miriam in the kitchen having a donut with a cup coffee. “Where’s Beth?” Miriam asked, because always the girls returned together, to go to Valentine’s room to listen to records and to gab about who knows what, boys, most likely.
    Valentine shrugged a shrug which implied I don’t want