“I’ll go check on him,” my mother said, but Hadas stopped her and said, “Let me. Why don’t you all relax a minute?”
I did what I was told. I sat on the couch and Hadas handed me a soda. Uri turned on the oven and set the tray of kibbeh inside, and as the smell of onions and cinnamon filled the room, I circled an arm around my mother, the other around Yael and waited for my dinner.
THE NEIGHBORS’ visits lasted two more days, through Shabbat. Then another week began, and Uri hosed the blood off the tractor and worked the fields himself. My mother went back to the vines, and that evening, when no one came by with a hot meal, we cooked the same hurried dinner we always had. Once again we ate with the radio on, this time tuned to the weather as temperatures climbed into the forties and there was talk of the heat wave not letting up for weeks. Now that Yael had decided to go to America she was around less: driving around buying gear or seeing her parents in Yoqneam. And with only a week to prepare for the trip before I was back in the army, I was busier than I’d been in years. It was as if we were all desperate for a reason to escape the house — but Asaaf, who needed fresh air more than any of us, refused to leave his bed. His TV was always on, like a never-ending soundtrack, and though he should have been on crutches by now, they were still leaning against his dresser, unused. Every time my mother peeked into his room and tried to get him to start doing exercises, warning about blood clots, he’d say he wasn’t ready. And when I suggested we take a walk, even up the driveway and back, he snapped that his room was off-limits and to get out. The sound of the TV, and his smell, began to stop bothering me — and even seeing him in bed started to feel normal, as if he had become as much a part of it as the mattress and box springs.
It cost too much to pay a nurse for more than Sunday home visits, so now that my mother and Yael were running around all day and I still had another week of leave, it was my job to check on Asaaf and to cook for everyone. But on Asaaf’s ninth day back from the hospital, my mother didn’t come home to eat at noon, or at one, and finally at two I went out in the fields to look for her. I found her hunched over the tomato vines. She was in her work clothes, cutoffs and sneakers and a ratty green t-shirt, and when I knelt beside her I saw the blackened bottoms on the tomatoes. I walked through the rows of vines and checked every piece of fruit — just to do something, really, since I knew she’d already inspected the entire crop, probably twice. Only about half the fruit was black, but blossom end rot spread quickly enough that it would be on every tomato by the morning.
“I left a message at the canning factories in Sederot and Kiryat Gat,” my mother said. The open-air markets wouldn’t buy blemished produce, so at this point all we could do was sell them for sauce. But if end rot was happening here it was affecting every farm in the north, and the others probably had the sense to call the canneries the moment the first black splotch appeared. Usually my mother would have been five steps ahead and it frustrated me that no one on the moshav had picked up her slack this week — but I had a feeling they’d tried and she just hadn’t let them.
“Tell me what I can do,” I said.
She was staring at the vines with the same strained expression I’d always assumed she reserved for me, and as I watched her now, I knew my mother wasn’t harsh — she just had the face of a person who’d spent too much of her life looking at terrible things.
“Nothing else to do out here,” she said quietly. “But Asaaf needs his lunch,” so I ran home and brought him a glass of grapefruit juice and a sandwich.
“The crop’s rotting,” I said, unfolding the legs of his tray. “Think there’s any place that’ll take them?”
“How would I know?” he said, more to the basketball game on TV than to me, and I blinked: he’d always at least pretended to know the answer.
“We’re pretty much screwed out of thousands of shekels,” I said.
“Oren?”
I stepped closer.
“I just want to be alone. Would you shut the door behind you?” he said, closing his eyes and falling into a sleep so deep and fast it had to be false.
I roamed the house, wondering if I should go back outside but knowing my mother would want me home with Asaaf. I opened the refrigerator, scrutinizing the cool shelves until the motor kicked in. Outside the window, Uri chugged by on the tractor, cutting through the fields and up to the toolshed. Finally I flopped on the living room sofa, settling on the same basketball game my brother had on two doors down.
Israel was up 76 to 48 against Montenegro, but one of our players was still running to the sidelines and waving his hands in the referee’s face, arguing over the basket, when my mother returned. Sweat lined her upper lip and the neck of her t-shirt. When she knocked on my brother’s door and he yelled “Sleeping!” her shoulders sagged and she went into the kitchen. She pulled a mug off the dish rack, her hand rattling as she stirred in Nescafé. “The canneries aren’t buying anymore,” she said. “I tried all four.” She kicked out the chair beside her and I sat down. “We’ll lose fifteen thousand shekels, easy. And this one,” she said, nodding toward Asaaf’s closed door, “he can’t even try to get on his crutches?”
She pressed her fingers to her face and rubbed her temples, and I noticed the lines fanning the corners of her mouth. I hadn’t seen her show this much of herself since I found her on the couch after a bad first date, years ago, listening to Yehoram Gaon with her knees tucked beneath her. I took her hand now, callused and tanned with rims of dirt wedged beneath her nails. “Listen,” I said. “I know it’s been rough. Let me know what I can do.”
“Thanks, Oren,” she said, squeezing back. “You know what you can do?”
I looked up at her. I smiled. “Anything.”
“Start tackling these dishes. They’ve been piling up all week and I’ve got to find Uri and Hadas.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but going from a lifesaving drive to dish patrol in under two weeks wasn’t it. But I had a feeling that drive no longer mattered to my mother. There would be no more praise, no bravery medal engraved in my honor to hang from the living room shelf. Mine were minor heroics, at best, and when I returned to work, I knew the lieutenant would continue to ignore me as I turned out of the loud, dusty base and onto the highway. No one was thinking about my drive anymore, and in a week we wouldn’t even be thinking about the tomatoes: there would be something else to deal with, and something after that — the way it had been since I could remember, and sensed it always would be.
So I stood up and cleared the table. My mother kissed my head and walked outside, and a moment later I watched her bicycle wheels kick up dirt and wind down the narrow driveway, growing smaller until she was just a glittery black speck in the day.
I hadn’t even finished scrubbing the pans when it was time for Asaaf’s next round of pills. When I let myself into his room, his sheets were tangled on the floor, giving me my first real look at the stump. A plastic brace kept his leg in place, and covering the bottom was an ace bandage, wrapped tightly up his thigh. He saw me watching and I turned away.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t care if you look.” He sat up and unwound the cloth.
Up close, freckles of dried blood circled the wound. The skin around it was red and puckered, and the stitches were starting to fall out. I didn’t know what I wanted more: to touch the ripples of raised skin, running my fingers over the bumps, or to bolt from the room. “Does it still hurt?”
“The first few days? Like a motherfucker. Now, not so much.” Maybe it was the morphine making Asaaf forget his room was off-limits, but still I edged onto his bed. “Another month and they’ll fit me for the prosthetic.”