“If so,” Alex said, “someone in town would know.”
“Mr. Rubin, this isn’t the Soviet Union. People are free to move about with no warning to anyone. Those kids could have spent a year in Montana on the way from California to God knows where.”
“She said ‘rodeo,’” Maya said. “There’s no rodeo in Shanghai. There is rodeo in Montana. I looked it up. It’s only the town, Mr. Mishkin!”
Mishkin looked over at Alex in a plea for help. Emotion was keeping Alex’s wife from seeing the full network of dead ends: Yes, those were the places for rodeo, but the young man might no longer be in rodeo. .
“Mrs. Rubin, when you leave the adoption agency, they take away your clearance, so to speak,” Mishkin said. “But they keep the gag order. I don’t have any of the files. I signed an agreement.”
“Oh, yes?” Maya said. “Are you writing your memoirs from memory?”
Mishkin tsked unhappily.
“You brought together one hundred fifty families,” Maya said. “You remember that we didn’t get Max from the hospital. But you don’t remember the town they’re from.”
“I don’t,” Mishkin said unpersuasively.
“So it was all right for them to come into our house, but we can’t return the favor,” Alex said.
“I understand that was a departure from”—Mishkin searched for the words—“the norm. But things like that happen at the eleventh hour. In retrospect, there may have been a better way to do things, sure. But you have to make the call in the moment. You want to say I made a mistake, go ahead.”
“Make another one,” Alex said.
“Mr. Rubin, two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Yes, Mr. Mishkin,” Maya said. “Please explain to us how things are done in America.”
A resentful silence settled on the room. Maya clutched her temples, which pounded with the animus of the whiskey. She swung her legs into the small space between her and her husband. Mishkin’s eyes grew wide; now, Maya Rubin was prostrate on his sectional.
He cleared his throat. “Are you all right, Mrs. Rubin?”
“We will leave,” she said hoarsely from the couch. “I just need fifteen minutes without noise until this migraine goes away. I am a terrible sufferer of migraines.”
“Mrs. Rubin!” Mishkin exclaimed. “Making you feel this way is the last thing in the world. .” He trailed away. They sat silently for a minute, until Mishkin was no longer able to bear the tableau of agonized wife and stone-faced husband.
“How about going upstairs, Mrs. Rubin?” he said. “There’s a guest room there.”
Maya moaned in distress, her palm on her forehead. Mishkin consulted Alex again, but Alex was looking past all of them, out at the woods.
Mishkin rose. “I’m going to give you some time,” he said. “I have to chop some wood for the sauna.”
Maya turned to face Mishkin. “Please don’t,” she said. “The chopping will make it worse.”
“Of course,” Mishkin said. “That was foolish of me. Sorry.”
“No, it was kind of you,” Maya said. “If I can be alone without noise, it should go away quickly. Will you take a walk with my husband?” She looked fleetingly at Alex, and, catching his eyes, wished to believe that he understood her intentions — or simply that she had some, and needed his help. They had had many moments of misunderstanding, of dissent — weren’t they due for one of silent concert? “Show Alex the homes here,” she went on. “We’ve been talking about a country place to please Max. If he wants to eat grass, let him at least eat grass where the air is clear. Come back in a half hour, and I will be back to normal.”
“Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But all the paperwork related to my time at the agency is under lock and key.”
She turned to face him again, wincing from the effort. “Mr. Mishkin, my son seems to have been birthed by a wolf. I came to you to plead for a clue, and you said no. Don’t add insult to what I am feeling. I need a half hour without noise. Every minute that we talk extends the recovery time.” She searched out his eyes. “And now forgive me for being rude, Mr. Mishkin, but I am a Jewish mother. When was the last time you went outside?”
Maya looked up at her husband. Alex rose, hoping that would stir Mishkin. “Go, please,” she said, in a voice choked by imminent tears. That did it. Confronted by the possibility of imminent tears, the men hustled into the hallway. Then the door shut behind them. Maya counted out a minute and swung her feet to the floor.
No, she was not going to look for agency paperwork. And she didn’t have time to clean as she would have liked. As she passed the crowded dining room table on her way to the kitchen, she saw the cover page of Mishkin’s opus: Memoirs: An Attempt at Living.
The cupboards held a rich array of amber liquids but little in the way of potential ingredients. A dusty bag of dried-out apricots, two baby trays of honey of the kind they gave out at the diner, a bag of turnipy potatoes, and a dozen cans of chili. The fridge offered a half-opened container of bacon and a decent clump of carrots, but that’s all. Maya closed her eyes and thought, the clock on the wall moving with twice the usual speed. She needed a little fortune. With eyes closed, she imagined her mother at the stove, her grandmother. But it was Uncle Misha who saved her. He had started a patch of sweet potatoes the summer before Maya flew to America, and when the first plums came in in late June, he set out two dozen on a screen under a cheesecloth and two bricks. A week later, he tore some carrots out of the garden Maya had started, and of all this — sweet potatoes, sun-dried plums, carrots — made tzimmes.
Maya didn’t have sweet potatoes, but there was a box of white sugar in the cupboard. She ran the kitchen faucet until scalding; in the meantime, she cubed the potatoes to the smallest size that would cook quickly without dissolving in boiling water. She worked on assumptions. Carrots — there was no time to peel them. The apricots were like wood under her knife, so she threw them in a bowl of hot water along with a tablespoon of sugar. Mishkin had once possessed cinnamon sticks; conveniently, they had crumbled into a cinnamon dust far more useful to her. She flavored with desperation.
When Gabriel Mishkin and Alex Rubin returned from their constitutional — evidently, they had found something to discuss, because the door opened to a sentence in progress, spoken by Alex, no less — a rectangular baking dish steamed from a corner of the dining room table where, Maya felt, she was causing the least disturbance to Mishkin’s research.
“What in God’s name is that—” Mishkin started to say from the hallway as the men removed their shoes. Indeed, the home was afloat with the perfume of butter, carrots, honey, and sugar. The sight of the baking dish spitting up steam toward the ceiling stopped his sentence.
“If you are going to write about the old country, you should know how they ate,” Maya said.
“Tzimmes,” the adoption supervisor said, his voice perturbed with wonder. “My grandmother made tzimmes. I haven’t had tzimmes in five hundred years. How in the world. .”
Maya looked over at Alex with pride. He was marveling — his wife could make tzimmes out of water and sticks. “The carrots are a little burnt because I had the highest heat going,” she issued the cook’s obligatory self-deprecation. “I wanted to finish it before you returned.”
Mishkin sniffed the tzimmes and looked back at her, shaking his head in disbelief.
“It helps with the migraines,” Maya said unconvincingly.
“Should we set up plates?” Mishkin said.
“No,” Maya answered quickly. “No, we have intruded on you long enough.”