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| Calligraphy: Pesach 5784 |

On Paper 

She watches him fearfully as he goes to pieces berating himself: the self-blame, self-hatred, the regret, the desperation

“I’ll be late…”

Her phone vibrates on the desk. Lea glances at the words as the text briefly lights up the screen, then focuses on the client in front of her.

“I really see what you mean,” Tamar is saying. “See what I mean, I mean.”

“I’m just reflecting what I’m hearing,” Lea says. “It’s you who’s doing the work.”

“I am.” Tamar can’t help smiling. “I think I finally am.”

Lea sees her client out through the side entrance, watches the woman take slow, thoughtful steps, and look up at the maple tree in the yard as if seeing it for the first time.

Once she’d been like that, too — when she was first training to be a therapist, learning about herself, peeling back the layers she hadn’t even known were protecting her heart. On training days she’d walk home slowly, hugging her newfound knowledge while the world recreated itself in front of her: sharper, more vivid, greener, bluer.

She still gets a glimmer of that heightened awareness, sometimes in the therapy room with a client, sometimes while talking with her supervisor, but mostly —

She looks down at her phone.

— mostly, she feels like she’s reached an impasse.

She grabs the phone and fires back, Dinner?

She straightens the therapy room while she waits. When he doesn’t respond after five minutes, she dials her husband.

“Yes?” David says, then, “Sam’s ordering in dinner for the office so you don’t need to make, thanks.”

She doesn’t bother telling him that she’s already made dinner. Years of putting dinner away in sad, small containers in the fridge have hardened her. Portion, freeze, defrost, reheat. If some of the heart evaporated in that sequence, she couldn’t help it.

Well, she’s hungry now. Lea goes to the kitchen: chromes, blinding whites, that gorgeous backsplash of the Alps, and state-of-the-art appliances. There are perks to being married to David Levine, CEO of Raleigh Realty.

There are, she tells herself as she ladles the soup into her lone bowl.

From her seat at the island, she spots the maple tree in the yard. Tamar is doing the work she has to, at last. Lea knows that she herself is good at what she does, that she gets through to her clients. She knows what she means to them.

But —

She slides one fish fillet onto a plate, takes a small helping of buttered potatoes, and looks into her lone plate.

—sometimes she wonders what she means to her own husband.

Excerpted from Mishpacha Magazine. To view full version, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE or LOG IN.

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