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spent afternoons tooling around on the tractor or strolling through the citrus groves. As he and Yael walked through the property, moshavniks popped up from the crops and congratulated him on his medal of valor. Asaaf had told my mother she was being ridiculous when she made a show of hanging it from the living room shelf, but out there he nodded humbly, thanking the workers, though later he told me they were fools if they believed medals meant anything. They’d never have known; he had a way of talking to people that made them feel both witty and important, and sometimes I wondered if I was the only one on earth who knew his other, judgmental side: repeating their words under his breath as we walked away, twisting their compliments into something crass and idiotic. I watched him and Yael zigzag through the squash and tomatoes and down to the dairy, and when he leaned in to kiss her, I felt my heart cave.
    He’d always had girlfriends, but before Yael they’d been the kind who lounged inside on their cell phones rather than working in the fields. I’d known her for years—back in high school we used to ride the bus home together while Asaaf stayed after for track practice, sharing vending machine junk, playing cards and road games I knew were childish but liked because I usually won. It would be inaccurate to say I enjoyed those rides together, when I always felt both terrified and thrilled sitting beside her as the bus bumped through the valley. She was more serious than almost anyone I knew back then, as if she were constantly looking beyond school, our neighborhood, even the country. That she believed she deserved a different, better life than the people around her hadn’t even struck me as snobbish, simply because she made whomever she was talking to, myself included, feel as though we deserved it too. Still, whenever I was with her I felt as if I were on uneven ground, that I could say one stupid thing and she’d find someplace else to sit.
    But that never happened, and those rides carried through to graduation, which was right around the time Asaaf noticed her. She’d never seemed his type—not just that she was always in sweats and flip-flops; more that she didn’t even seem to exist within the same orbit as the other girls he usually dated, the ones who threw as much of themselves into getting his attention as he did into winning the hundred-meter dash. But then he went for her, without a thought that I might be interested myself, and she surprised me by falling for him as quickly and gushingly as all the others. And just like that, our time together seemed blotted-out and forgotten, as she lay beside Asaaf on our sofa, watching TV at night, or scrambling eggs in the morning while he leaned against the counter in his boxers, swigging juice straight from the carton. But that wasn’t the worst part. It was that they actually made sense together. She made him nicer, he made her more relaxed, and together they were like some strong, unstoppable force, breezing through life on a sleek and glorious ship while the rest of us watched from the shore.
    She was the one girlfriend of his my mother could stand, the one girl who helped around the house, the dairy, in the garden, sifting through the mud for nightcrawlers. That’s disgusting, Asaaf had said as the bugs skirted down her fingers and into the compost, but Yael shook her head. You see their pink bellies? They’re kind of beautiful, she said, and in her hands they actually were.

    A ND NOW , for the second time this week, I welcomed Asaaf back home. He was in a clean white t-shirt with the medical tag still dangling from his wrist, and my mother had to swerve his wheelchair around the driveway to avoid potholes. His face was the same—three days in the hospital hadn’t paled him—but his eyes were sleepy and red from the painkillers, and his left sweatpant leg was folded over neatly, like the flap of an envelope.
    Asaaf squinted up at me as my mother ran