“Then you should not speak of it again. I know her husband, he is a righteous man.”

“Cursed with an insane girl for a wife.”

“Poor thing,” my father said, tearing away a hunk of bread. His hands were as hard as horn, as square as hammers, and as gray as a leper’s from the limestone he worked with. An embrace from him left scratches on my back that sometimes wept blood, yet my brothers and I fought to be the first in his arms when he returned from work each evening. The same injuries inflicted in anger would have sent us crying to our mother’s skirts. I fell asleep each night feeling his hand on my back like a shield.

Fathers.

Do you want to mash some lizards?” I asked Joshua when I saw him again. He was drawing in the dirt with a stick, ignoring me. I put my foot on his drawing. “Did you know that your mother is mad?”

“My father does that to her,” he said sadly, without looking up.

I sat down next to him. “Sometimes my mother makes yipping noises in the night like the wild dogs.”

“Is she mad?” Joshua asked.

“She seems fine in the morning. She sings while she makes breakfast.”

Joshua nodded, satisfied, I guess, that madness could pass. “We used to live in Egypt,” he said.

“No, you didn’t, that’s too far. Farther than the temple, even.” The Temple in Jerusalem was the farthest place I had been as a child. Every spring my family took the five-day walk to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. It seemed to take forever.

“We lived here, then we lived in Egypt, now we live here again,” Joshua said. “It was a long way.”

“You lie, it takes forty years to get to Egypt.”

“Not anymore, it’s closer now.”

“It says in the Torah. My abba read it to me. ‘The Israelites traveled in the desert for forty years.’”

“The Israelites were lost.”