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Susan watched his hands. They were honest hands, with veins that ran blue over wrists as slender as a woman’s, a smudge of ink on the side of the palm, a few stoic hairs as placeholders on the finger where a ring should be. They were the hands, she reminded herself, of the father of someone else’s nineteen-month-old girl.
    What, “considering”? she said.
    Well, considering the whole situation, the whole damn mess, the whole way it’s not supposed to be.
    Oh right, Susan said. Not the white picket fence and the two-point-five kids and the perfect little wife.
    He looked up at her, pressed his lips together in a line. You just don’t get it, do you, he said.
    After the breakup, Susan had dated one man after another, all eligible and Jewish but phobic of commitment and neurotic in bed. Friends fixed her up with a forensic psychiatrist, a software entrepreneur with a cocaine habit, a venture capitalist, a rabbinical candidate. Twice, she was fixed up with the same man, an overweight district attorney with a mouth like a fish.
    Her parents never nagged her about her unmarried state, but Susan knew they were concerned. It was grandchildren they wanted, continuation of the line. Only once, when she mentioned a friend from high school who’d recently had a baby, her mother said, Honey, you are going to be the last of the Mohicans.
    When Susan and her ex-boyfriend returned to his parents’ house, the place was dark and his parents had gone to bed. They stood bythe kitchen sink, sipping glasses of water, like two people at the intermission of a play.
    Her ex-boyfriend offered her the guest room or the attic. She said, The attic’s fine.
    She followed him up two flights of stairs to a daybed wedged under the eaves, surrounded by dusty stacks of magazines and baskets of old toys. It was a hot night, and the attic was at least ten degrees hotter than the rest of the house. He pushed open a dormer window, which gave out a creak and a breath of dust.
    He brushed his hands on his jeans. Are you sure you’ll be okay?
    She said, It’s fine.
    They stood there for a moment and then Susan stepped forward, even though she’d vowed she wouldn’t, and he put his arms around her, pressing her face against his shirt. Then he pulled back and let his hands drop to his sides.
    Sleep tight, he said.
    After he left, Susan stretched out on the daybed, fully dressed, and listened to the sound of running water and the creaking of doors downstairs. She tried not to think about the two of them asleep below, the child among the old trophies and yearbooks, her ex-boyfriend in the sleigh bed that had once been theirs, his feet on the marks of a dead cowboy’s spurs.
    An old black-and-white photograph hung in the hallway in Susan’s grandparents’ Haifa flat, a picture of a group of people in bathing suits posing on a beach. In the center, a man stood with his hands on the shoulders of two women, the man in the kind of black one-piece swimming costume, like an acrobat’s leotard, that was the fashion around the turn of the last century, the women in short-sleeved cotton frocks tied with string sashes at the waist, printed kerchiefson their heads. The women were on tiptoe, their heels raised off the ground, as if they were slowly levitating. Between the women, three children sat in a descending line, their hands on each other’s shoulders, the youngest one, a girl, holding a doll. Everyone was smiling except the little girl—Susan’s grandmother—and her doll. If you looked closely, you could see that the doll’s mouth was open, her arms up by her head, her legs bent and kicking in the air, as if she were trying to wrench herself free from Susan’s grandmother’s grasp and cartwheel down the sand.
    In a dream, Susan is last in line in this upside-down pyramid, seated cross-legged at her grandmother’s feet, her grandmother’s hands on her shoulders, and she is