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therapy. Touch therapy. Flowers, chocolates, trinkets; a blitzkrieg of love. Her only child, he would bring to the surface the maternal instinct seething like a century-old fire at the bottom of a coal mine.
    Bina sat, stared, her unoccupied hands kneading the air.
    Her doctors couldn’t agree on the cause of the fidgeting. She’d been medicated off and on for Parkinson’s. Well-intentioned nurses would give her whatnot to fuss with—a toilet paper tube, a stress ball with a pharmaceutical company logo.
    There we go. Now she won’t be so bored.
    She had been a gifted and prolific ceramicist, once. Jacob asked the staff if they’d ever tried giving her clay.
    They hadn’t thought of that.
    The following visit, he’d arrived with a package of Plasticine, seven rainbow-hued slabs stuck together. He pulled off a hunk of red, rolled it to warm it up, pressed it into her hands, and waited for the healing to begin.
    She froze.
    Ima?
    Inert as the clay itself.
    Maybe she wanted a different color? He tried orange. Same result.
    He worked his way through the spectrum. Nothing. She was a waxwork. It unnerved him worse than the twitching. He took the clay and put it back in its pouch.
    I’ll leave this in your room in case you want it.
    His visits thinned to every other day, then twice a week, once. The staff didn’t judge him. On the contrary: they seemed to approve. At last he’d gotten with the program, accepting the basic worthlessness of his presence. The very model of a dutiful son.
    She asked for you.
    Another lie. More than two years, and his mother hadn’t uttered a word.
    •   •   •
    “W HO  . . . WANTS  . . .
meatloaf?
”
    Her name was Rosario, and she was Jacob’s favorite nurse.
    “Looks good,” he said.
    Rosario, tying on Bina’s bib, raised a penciled eyebrow. “I can get you some.”
    “I’m okay, thanks.”
    She peeled back the foil on a container of apple juice. “You’re always saying how good it looks. I notice you don’t eat it, though. You know what I think? I think you’re a big talker . . . Am I right, honey?”
    Bina pursed her lips.
    “Yeah, exactly.” To Jacob: “Need anything, I’m inside.”
    Alone again with his mother, he took a pair of challah rolls from his backpack and swaddled them in a paper napkin. He uncapped a mini-bottle of grape juice and filled the extra Dixie cup Rosario had supplied.
    He cranked up a smile. “Ready, Ima?”
    He began to sing
Shalom Aleichem
, the tune that welcomed in the Sabbath.
    Peace unto you, ministering angels, angels of the Most High.
    Peering through the knotty canopy of the fig tree, he pictured a pair of ethereal winged creatures crashing to earth, wondering what wrong turn they had taken to wind up on the rear patio of Pacific Continuing Care, a division of Graffin Health Services Inc.
    Come in peace, angels of peace, angels of the Most High.
    It was precisely because he didn’t observe the Sabbath that he’d chosen Friday afternoon for his weekly visit. His father
was
observant, which meant Jacob could come by the facility without any chance of running into him.
    While he was here, though, why not? Maybe the ceremony would touch some dormant spot in Bina’s memory. Even if he felt foolish, mumbling the
kiddush
prayer, answering
amen
on her behalf, curling her fingers around the cup.
    He watched his mother sip juice. Guided her tremulous hands to the rolls and made the blessing on bread and handed her a fork.
    “You want seconds, speak up,” he said, hating the rancor in his tone.
    For a few minutes, Jacob watched her eat—robotic, each item delivered in methodical forkfuls. As always, he quickly grew bored. As always, he felt guilty for feeling bored. To occupy himself, he reached into his backpack for the files.
    “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”
    Hipolito Zamora, thirty-one, Westlake, stabbed to death outside a nightclub. No witnesses; no suspects.
    “Outside a nightclub and no one sees. Gimme a