Cricket in a Fist by Naomi K. Lewis Page A

We’re a family now.” He was aglow with the drama of what he’d done, just as he trembled with anxiety to be on his way elsewhere.
    Leave
, she willed.
    He had appeared for the first time at Tamar’s workplace, beside the makeup counter, picking up crystal perfume bottles and turning them over for inspection the way one might approach a cut of meat. His hair flopped over his forehead, and he looked intently tired, with soft shadows under his wide-set bright grey eyes. It was the kind of face that wore youth unconvincingly, that was made to be old and weather-worn. Tamar reached for the crystal bottle that he was surely about to drop, and he let her take it. He said, “Are you Ginny Reilly’s mother?”
    And only months later Asher was sitting on the red sofa with its little burgundy flowers, Tamar’s pregnant daughter spirited away into some hole of an apartment Tamar had never seen. He said, “Whatever feelings you have about me, you just need to put them aside. I have to concentrate on Ginny. Your daughter is a very intelligent person, but her intelligence is unfocused. She was a precocious child with no structure in her life.” He had a habit of opening his hand abruptly to emphasize his words, like a starburst. A frog’s foot. He looked at Tamar sadly, wisely. “And now she’s a childish, an insecure person.”
    Tamar willed,
Disappear
.
    *
    And now Asher was gone, must have landed in Tel Aviv only hours ago. Tamar stood at his sink, scrubbing the last of the dirty dishes he left behind. Mid-August, the humidity at its peak, the apartment sweltering. Asher’s dishes, Asher’s bedroom, Asher’s bathroom. This was Tamar’s first visit here, and while she tried to think of it as her daughter’s apartment, it only seemed absurd that Ginny would stay here when he had left. Incongruous and invasive. Ginny claimed that if she and Asher were married, Tamar would feel differently. And how grateful Tamar was that there was no marriage to contend with along with everything else. That she was not compelled, as Ginny put it, to take the relationship seriously.
    Two foil-covered glass dishes sat on the wooden counter. A dozen chicken croquettes and dish of pad thai — Ginny’s favourites. Esther had spent the previous evening preparing the spicy noodles, and just that morning, she’d chopped the leftover chicken she’d been saving and mixed it with a thick, white sauce. Tamar knew there were eggs involved, then bread crumbs and the deep fryer. Esther always cooked and Tamar cleaned up afterwards, and although she frequently resolved to learn some of her mother’s recipes, Tamar couldn’t retain any memory of the separate steps. She remembered coming home from work, when Robert was alive and Ginny was a little girl, to a fish soup with dumplings. She’d held one of the soft, spongy-white dumplings in her spoon and asked Esther, in English, “How do you make these?”
    Esther answered in Dutch, then repeated what she’d said in English for Robert and Ginny’s benefit. “You just make. Read in the book. Make so it looks like the picture.” But to look in her mother’s cookbooks would have been like reading someone’s diary. Esther’s spidery handwriting filled the margins, sometimes scrawled right on the recipes themselves. Mostly she wrote in Dutch or Yiddish, sometimes in English. Once, sitting down to breakfast, Tamar thought she saw some Hebrew letters pencilled between the lines of a recipe for lemon chicken. Tamar couldn’t read Hebrew and hadn’t known that Esther could either; she flipped the book shut.
    The two dishes, foil tucked perfectly over their contents, could not be put away until Tamar scrubbed Asher’s fridge with baking soda. Sitting in front of the open fridge promised relief from the stifling heat, and Tamar was saving the task for last. Long drips of juice had dried