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“No, he shouldn’t have. But you were there, too. Don’t act like you were some kind of victim. We both know you were after him even before that night.”
Flash smiled. “I was after him. You would be, too, if you saw him.”
“Oh, I’ve seen him.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“I Googled him. Handsome, very handsome. Nice face, nice hair and nice eyes. Big shoulders. Good strong neck. I loved Dr. Scheinberg’s neck. I liked to nibble it at stoplights in the car. He’d drive home a little faster when I did.”
“Mrs. Scheinberg!”
She waved her hand again, poo-pooing Flash’s shock.
“Don’t be silly. We were married. Sex between a husband and a wife is a mitzvah. And, oh, was it a mitzvah with him.”
“I should do a mitzvah for Ian. I was...not nice to him.”
Mrs. Scheinberg had explained mitzvot were something like commandments. But more than that, more like good deeds or blessings.
“What happened?” Mrs. Scheinberg asked. “And do I want to know?”
“He offered me his friendship and I said no way. He offered to pay me for helping him fix his fireplace screen, and I said I’d do it if he slept with me.”
“Young lady, that is shameful.”
“I know, I know.” Flash buried her head in her hands before looking up again. “He’s never going to love me. Men like that don’t love women like me. They screw women like me. They don’t marry women like me and make me part of their perfect prissy lives.”
“Women like you? What’s a woman like you?”
“I’m blue collar. Ian is very white collar. Seriously, he has the whitest collars I’ve ever seen. He must own stock in a bleach company.”
“I was a welder, too, and I married a doctor.”
“You were a teenage welder because you were helping with the war effort.”
“My mother was a housewife and my father a baker. We were poor, dear. And Dr. Scheinberg was anything but. Now stop with the inferiority complex. Any man would be lucky to have you. Including Mr. Ian Asher. Especially Mr. Ian Asher. And I think he knows it already, which is why he offered his friendship.”
Mrs. Scheinberg stood up and wiped her hands on a lacy handkerchief that Flash guessed had belonged to her mother, much like everything else in this room.
“I think he’s afraid of me.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Mrs. Scheinberg said over her shoulder as she walked to her dining room table. “It isn’t like you’ve purposely tried to terrorize him by playing schoolyard pranks on him.”
“I’m not very good at relationships.”
“You’ll get better with practice.”
“What should I do?”
“I think you should apologize to him for trying to buy his body.”
“But it’s such a nice body.” Flash sighed. “Do you think I should try being friends with him?”
“Being just friends with someone you’re in love with can be hard. And dishonest if you’re only using the friendship in the hopes of it becoming something more.” Mrs. Scheinberg took the lid of a blue-and-white box on her table and removed something from the box wrapped in blue velvet.
“What’s that?”
“My Hanukkiah, but you’d call it a menorah, my darling gentile,” Mrs. Scheinberg said as she carefully unwrapped a silver nine-branched candelabrum. “Moshe gave it to me after he and his wife came back from their last trip to Israel. Isn’t it beautiful?”
