“Listen, we both know she’s prone to…”
“What? She’s prone to what?” I goaded him.
“Exaggerate,” he snapped at me. “Mountains out of molehills is her special gift.”
I gasped again. “How dare you!”
“God.”
“And the brisket recipe is sacred,” I announced with conviction.
“Like you even eat brisket.”
“You are an ungrateful son,” I informed him over his soft laughter. “And me not eating the brisket issonot the point.”
“You need to inform Barbara Kohn that people are supposed to be kind and forgiving on the Sabbath and not talking about other people behind their back to the rabbi.”
“Now, now, it’s important that Rabbi Melamed not think your mother doesn’t know her way around a brisket. He needs to understand that when he’s at Rose Silverberg’s house and he’s putting a nice piece of meat on his plate, one so soft and succulent that it cuts with a fork, that’s your mother’s doing and no other’s.”
Eli turned to me, his brows furrowed. “What’s happened to you?”
“I’m just saying, we have to stick up for ourselves.”
“She’s completely corrupted you.”
“We can’t take anything lying down,” I went on.
“Are you talking about you or my mother?”
“All of us,” I assured him.
“I see.”
We were quiet for a bit.
“I don’t see why I can’t just go home. They said early on, before you even showed up, that they’d have a police car sitting outside on the street in front of my place until they figured out who was behind this.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” he acknowledged sarcastically. “And how long will that be?”
“How would I know?”
He nodded, placating me. “And what if, somehow, I’m wrong and you are being targeted?”
“I don’t—”
“Because if you are, then a professional is after you, so how do cops on the street help keep you safe from a person shooting you through a window?”
“Well,” I teased him, “technically, we’d find out pretty fast how good the guy is.”
Eli veered sharply to the right before coming to a screeching halt in a loading area in front of an office building.
“What the fuck, Eli?” I yelled at him as my seat belt caught me painfully.
“Hey, guess what, it’s too fuckin’ soon for stupid-ass jokes.”
I huffed out a breath. “Yeah. Okay. Sorry.”
“Are you?” he pressed me, and from the sound of his voice and the fire in his gaze, I understood that he was angry.