As usual Jacob arrived early. He had driven around the entire Disabilities Center, fifty flat acres dotted with wilted saplings and dull buildings. Most were one-story rectangles constructed of pitted, gray cement blocks. Some were camouflaged by flanking wings. Wooden posts signified units with fuzzy terms like “Pediatrics,” “Non-Ambulatory,” and “Cottages.” Scrubby foundation planting made the crude unfinished look of the place seem worse. Tamped under low gray clouds the drab barren landscape brought sickening memories to mind.
Sizing up a situation before settling in was a habit from another time and place. His life had then depended on avoiding the Ukrainian Nazi police and the SS bastards themselves. “Absurd, this is America,” his wife, Gertrude, chided when he seemed excessively wary. But she understood that his compulsive search for unlikely danger curbed anxiety. Like a nervous tic checked tension. At least she had until now.
His watch read 8:30. The second appointment with Mrs. Segovia, the social worker, to discuss Wilfred’s move to the Center, was at nine. At their first meeting, last week, she had looked back and forth from Jacob to Gertrude and furrowed her brow. “Your accents are — well, exotic, but different from one another’s,”she said. She was not the first to wonder about which department in heaven had made this match.
Gertrude was tall and shapely and her long red-tinted blonde hair was rolled loosely on top of her head. Her German-accented English was refined to soft precision.
Jacob was hardly exotic. A neighbor woman, after seeing the Broadway show, Fiddler On the Roof, had said to him, “You could be in the cast, a big bear of a Tevye, accent, clothes and all.”
Jacob pulls into the medical clinic parking...
Subscribe now to keep reading
Please enter your email to log in or create a new account.