Summary

The story begins with the unnamed first-person narrator in the midst of a conversation with two other characters. We learn that the two other characters, Mark and Lauren, are visiting the narrator and his wife in South Florida from Jerusalem. The mood is immediately confrontational, although not aggressive: Mark makes broad statements about Florida in the context of “the Israeli occupation” which the narrator disagrees with (3). However, the narrator’s wife, Deb, quells his potential rebuttals, changing the subject to Mark and Lauren’s children. While Deb and Lauren move to the den to find pictures of the family, Mark jokes self-deprecatingly, and the narrator comments to himself that he may “think about giving him a chance” (4).

We learn that Deb and Lauren were close friends through Yeshiva, or Orthodox Jewish high school and college, in New York. The narrator notes, “They stayed best...