Rockaway by Tara Ison Page A

of that, you don’t even know this guy. “You know, I’m just tired. Really. What time is it, anyway?” she asks, standing. Marty doesn’t answer, just nods, chewing his lip, and she heads back toward the dining room.
    â€œSarah,” says Itzak. “Come, join us. Have some of this.” He smiles at her, carding smooth the fibers of his beard with one hand and offering her a breast-shaped snifter of brandy with the other. “And come every Friday for shabbes. You’re always welcome.”
    Walking the seven blocks by five blocks back to the house in the nighttime dark, passing again all those families heading home now from synagogue, the sleepy children carried in their parents’ arms, Sarah and Marty talk politely about movies and fog. She murmurs enthusiastic thanks fifteen feet from the front door, and darts into the house without kissing him on the cheek.

    THE NEXT MORNING while munching toast and browsing through A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World , Sarah doodles an idea of a shell on the sports section of Newsday , which she is using as a placemat, just below her coffee mug’s damp brown ring. It is not a very identifiable shell, nothing pictured in the book, perhaps some kind of generic gastropod. She looks at it a moment, then sketches in the gastropod’s little foot, peering out. She is using the black ballpoint pen Bernadette keeps for phone messages, and it blobs a bit, messing things up. She dumps her crumbs on top of the shell and sports section and scoops it all into the box Avery uses for recyclable paper.
    She is low on food. Last night’s fog is gone, and the sun is a white blister; she puts on her sunglasses, pedals into town on the little-girl bike, and buys: milk, broccoli, tuna, pasta. Olive oil. A bag of oranges, and, why not, a box of unpresumptuous and probably stale matzoh. She has the casual thought of purchasing kosher wine or brandy, maybe for a future shabbes gift, but there is none in the grocery store. She buys a regular kind of table wine, a half-gallon of red, tucks it in her backpack.
    On her way home, produce and matzoh shaking in her basket, the heavy bottle between her shoulder blades throwing her slightly off-balance, the bicycle turns off the boulevard and down a street that leads to the beach, several blocks from Nana’s. Why not? she thinks again. There’s nohurry to get home. It’s a pretty day to pedal around. Check out the neighborhood a little more. Be conscious of this beautiful day, appreciate it, fine. The weather is warming; down beyond the end of the street, out on the beach she sees what looks like a bathing-suited family spreading out towels near the still-empty lifeguard chair, or maybe it’s a couple of sibling teenagers babysitting a toddler. Maybe I’ll go swimming later, she thinks, maybe it’ll be warm enough to be okay. Should’ve bought some ginger ale. In the gaps between houses she spots a few back porch decks, a barbecue, an inflated plastic wading pool, laundry flapping on lines. She rides up and down the length of the street, the bicycle jolting over cracks, looking for a hanging black sweatsuit or jeans. She starts to feel slightly ridiculous, like an ice cream truck circling in desperate search of customers.
    Behind a small brick and clapboard house facing the beach she spots a clothesline with dark, drooping squares and rectangles, and the smaller smudge of a hat-sized black dot. She fumbles to take off her sunglasses and the bicycle wobbles; she overcompensates by overjerking the handles, and the front tire flips sideways as if kicked. She falls, skidding, to the asphalt, landing first on one knee, then on her back, the bicycle collapsed and plinging on top of her. Oranges roll across the street.
    When she can gasp out a breath again, it comes as crying. Her pants are torn; her ripped knee stings and bleedsgrit, her shoulder feels shoved through her chest, and she