It had been 24 years of what-ifs

"Aaarghhh.”

It’s only soap! Rochel reminds herself as she drops into a chair at the dining room table. She’s still holding the bottle of liquid soap, still twisting the top of the pump in furious circles until it comes off in her hand.

Mordche comes in. He’s not wearing shoes and his white shirt has that lived-in look of his mid-morning quarantine nap. “Rochel, what’s wrong?”

She shoves the beheaded soap bottle toward him and opens her palm to show him the flimsy top.

He leans closer to her. “The soap bottle broke? That’s why you’re upset?”

“No. Yes. I mean, it’s nothing.”

She runs her thumb along the surface of the broken plastic. Colorless bumps. An arrow? The word “open”? Even with her reading glasses, she can’t tell. Why are the details on packaging so hard to make out? Are all the manufacturers young?

Pre-coronavirus, she’d gone to the dollar store and bought a few magnifying glasses. She’d placed them in strategic spots around the house — bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. But her young grandsons — in the halcyon days when they’d chased each other through Zaidy and Bubby’s house — had found the magnifying glasses and stuck them in their pockets to play “police,” and she hasn’t seen any of them since.

She gets up, taking the soap bottle with her, and calls over her shoulder, “Mordche, I’ll make you something to eat. A vegetable omelet.”

In the kitchen, she pours too much liquid soap directly from the mouth of the bottle onto her hands. Her skin is reddened and cracked. She’d ordered this soap online — moisturizing lemon verbena — because the picture conjured a sense of healing. But it smells like chemicals and brings to mind a factory with vats of liquid and an assembly line where tens of thousands of green-and-yellow labels are glued onto cheap plastic.

Liba liked what she called “flavored soap,” and Rochel used to remind her that soap is scented, not flavored, because we don’t eat soap.

Liba had eaten soap once. She’d crawled into the children’s bathroom, reached up to the tub and grabbed the bar of soap. Rochel noticed the white suds in the corner of her mouth and pushed her finger around her baby’s soft gums to fish out the pieces.

Then she’d handed Liba, squirming and screaming, to Mordche and said, “I prepare fresh homemade baby food and ‘choo choo’ each spoonful into her mouth and she spits so much of it out, but soap she eats!”

She can’t think about Liba now.

It’s already one of those achy days.