Rachel? Alive? As he cleared the coffee cups and breakfast dishes from the kitchen table, Ezra Kaufmann saw his wife getting ready to go off to her job as a middle school teacher, pushing back her chair, picking up her tote bag brimming with student papers, saying something to him which he could not hear, he now taking a long, thoughtful look at her and thinking, Should I tell her? But tell her what?, the truth being that she had cancer or rather that she had had cancer and now she was, in fact, dead. Or was she? The clear evidence in front of his own eyes said no. She was back from the dead. It made no sense. It was a miracle. But there it was. In fact, he had found himself in the same situation numerous times since she had died. No point in telling her. Just hold his tongue and hope for the best.
Right about then the clock radio switched on—the news was always the same; he turned it off—and Ezra turned over in bed, the same queen bed which they had shared for many years but which he now slept in, on the same side, alone. The light was filtering through the blinds, the broken slat still broken, the blinds still slightly askew. He needed to fix them.
There was a knock on the door.
“Dad, can you take me to school? I’m running late.”
His sixteen-year-old son Jonathan stood in the doorway, already dressed in baggy jeans and...
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