Read Online All I Love and Know by Judith Frank - Free Book Online

the room, he looked at his still face and closed eyes. “Yeast,” he said. “The Angel bread factory is right across the valley.”
    They were so tired, they crawled into the small double bed without brushing their teeth. Daniel let out a sigh and turned his back to Matt, curling into a ball. Matt gently spooned him, careful to make his touch feel like solace and not a demand. Daniel was hot and sticky from sweat and tears, the air cool and yeasty, and a kind of sensuous peace came over Matt. They fell asleep within minutes.
    But two hours later, Matt awoke to find Daniel lying awake beside him. “Hey,” he said.
    â€œHey.”
    They lay in silence for a while, the only sound the ticking of the desk clock. Matt drifted off for a few minutes, then awoke again, looked over at Daniel and saw his eyelids blinking. “Do you want to tell me what you said about your brother in your eulogy?” he asked.
    Daniel continued to stare into space. Matt heard the dry sound of his chapped lips opening. “I said,” he whispered, “that Joel and Ilana would not want their deaths to be used as an opportunity for another wave of violence. They would not want people killed in their name. They were people who worked for social justice.”
    â€œYou said that?”
    Daniel nodded.
    â€œThat’s beautiful, honey. And brave to say.”
    Daniel shrugged. His face twitched. “A lot of good it’ll do,” he said.
    Matt fell back asleep, and when he awoke two hours later, he found that Gal was in their bed, between them, breathing raucously, one arm flung over his neck. He removed her arm gently and turned toward her and Daniel. Daniel was awake; Matt could see the movement of his eyelids blinking. He fell asleep again and awoke exactly two hours later, grief and jet lag seeming to have planted in him a diabolically precise clock. As the night crawled on, he dreamed ponderous dreams about problems with the designs he was working on back home. He woke again, got up and went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and explored the leftovers: pea soup in a pot, some baked chicken in a dish covered with foil, a tiny bit of rice in a Tupperware container. Ilana’s food, he thought; the prospect of eating it seemed deeply symbolic of something, but he was too tired to figure out what. He took out some milk, closed the refrigerator door, and fixed himself a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios from a box with Hebrew writing on it. He sat down at the table where Joel’s wedding ring and tattered wallet sat, along with Sam’s watch, some worn and folded pieces of paper, the social worker’s business card. He picked up the wallet and opened it, and found another two tiny nails caught in the lining. He got up and threw them in the garbage.
    The cereal was sweet and comforting; he ate in big mouthfuls, wiping milk off his chin. He wondered if he and Daniel would be the kind of parents who gave their kids apples or grapes for dessert instead of chocolate pudding, and sent them to school with horrible Little House on the Prairie sandwiches on organic whole wheat bread. He thought that if your parents had been blown up, a Ho Ho probably wasn’t the worst thing that would ever happen to you. He went back to bed as dawn was breaking, hearing a donkey’s strident bray from down below. In the dim light, Gal was blinking at him, sleepy and solemn. She reached a hand toward his face as he settled in beside her, and he kissed it, and her eyes filled with tears. “I want Ema,” she said in a tiny voice. The sound of those words, her wish aloud in the air, made her face crumple. Her grief, Matt thought, already seemed weary and resigned.
    â€œI know, Boo,” he whispered. He sat up and pulled her limp body onto his lap, kissed her wet face, and rocked her.

CHAPTER 3
    W HEN HE AWOKE in the mornings, there was a moment when Daniel’s spirit felt light. Then a vague unsettled