All I Love and Know by Judith Frank Page B

his feet and led him back to his seat. There was a long respectful pause. Then a friend of Joel’s named Shmulik, a man with a round droll face and a very slight lisp, got up and told some story in a rapid-fire delivery that sent waves of laughter over the hall. Matt watched Daniel’s face break and redden, taken by surprise, and hearing the peal of his laughter made Matt love him so much he could hardly stand it.
    There was a brief speech by a fat honcho. And then a bunch of Hasids came and took hold of the pallets the bodies lay upon, and the mourners walked out to the cemetery through the chilly night air, Lydia clutching Daniel’s arm, up a long paved incline and onto this hillside. The Hasids swayed and prayed over the bodies, and Matt gazed at their long beards and side curls, thinking that if Ilana was standing beside him, she’d have something sarcastic to say. They laid the bodies straight into the ground without coffins, and each person shoveled dirt over the grave. He looked quickly at Gal, hidden behind her grandfather’s leg. She was crying, her eyes darting around, as if trying to alight upon the person who would save her; the wind was whipping at her face, making her hair fly. Matt burst into tears. He cried through the singing of the national anthem. The women’s voices rose tearfully at first, tinny and a little shrill, then took strength in numbers and grew in beauty and texture. The sound of voices in unison, men and women an octave apart, in the cold night air, with the stars shining fiercely, pierced him through with grief and something like joy. He looked at Gal and saw that her lips were moving too, even as tears ran down her face. He told himself to remember that singing would bring her solace.
    WHEN THEY GOT HOME they were quiet. Ilana’s parents had gone to their own house, leaving the children with the Rosens. The baby was fast asleep in his car seat; Daniel reached in and eased him over his shoulder, carried him in. “Should I change him?” he murmured to his mother.
    â€œNo,” she said. “Never wake a sleeping baby.”
    Daniel laid him in his crib without waking him. Lydia went into the bathroom to wash up for bed. In the kitchen, Sam was taking a Ziploc bag out of his briefcase. “I just remembered this,” he said, and then looked up to see whom he was talking to. His eyes fell on Matt, who sat down with him at the table. Sam sat heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and pondered Joel’s effects. He removed Joel’s wedding ring and slipped it over his pinkie, where it caught on the second knuckle. Matt saw that his fingers had thickened over the years and his own wedding band was now a tight squeeze. There was a filthy wallet. Sam went through it and took out dirty cash, tiny wrinkled photographs of Ilana and the kids, and laid them on the table. And then Joel’s cell phone, still in its holder. Daniel came into the room. “What’s that?” he asked.
    Sam undid the Velcro fastener and pulled out the phone. Two small black nails clattered onto the table. Sam inhaled sharply. The three of them stared at one another. Daniel reached down and picked them up, brought them to his face, and sniffed them.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Sam asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Daniel said, stuffing the nails into his pocket.
    They fell out later, when he and Matt undressed and folded their pants over the tiny guest room’s desk chair. Matt stooped and gathered them off the floor, and suppressing a strong desire to throw them in the trash, set them on the desk. Daniel was taking the pillows off the foldout couch and laying them in a stack in a corner of the room. He slid the bed open and went in search of sheets. At the other end of the apartment, Lydia and Sam were putting Gal to bed.
    The window was slid open to the chilly night air, and a lovely smell was wafting in. Matt tried to place it. When Daniel came back into