Free The Saturday Wife by Naomi Ragen

to judge whether a chicken was kosher, he could probe and probe its insides, examine its viscera, turning it over and over until he found some reason to call it treife. Or he could look at the chicken’s owner to see if he was a rich man or a poor man, deciding how much he needed the chicken. Thinking of her, Chaim decided on the latter tack. Under no circumstances was he willing to call this chicken treife. That being the case, he thanked Josh for his honesty and his help, broadly hinting that he needed no more information.
    “I appreciate what you are trying to do, Josh, really. But I know you and Rivkie would never have arranged for me to meet Delilah in the first place if you’d thought there was something wrong with her behavior.”
    That, of course, put Josh into a serious bind. What could he say? That he had not been aware of any of this until his Talmud study partner, who knew Yitzie from the neighborhood, had mentioned it in passing? And that only then had he squeezed the information out of Rivkie, who was on close terms with both Penina Gwertzman and Sharona Gottleib and had reluctantly sought the source of her roommate’s heartbreak—with the best of intentions, of course. Josh of course forgave her for not being worldly enough to understand the implications of such behavior. But to admit his error, he realized, would be to jeopardize his own infallible reputation, as well as that of his future wife, who had set this whole tsimmes boiling in the first place. Besides, all things considered, Chaim’s other marriage prospects were not brilliant, and Delilah Levi seemed to be his heart’s desire. Was it not written that Forty days before conception a heavenly voice cries out, “This man for this woman?” Who was Josh to argue?
    He didn’t, nodding in silent acquiescence and hoping for the best.

    Two weeks before the wedding, Rivkie bumped into Delilah and Chaim on a street in Manhattan. Delilah, Rivkie thought, looked great. She was wearing a blue cashmere sweater and a slim skirt of supple black leather that ended just above her knees. She had on blue eyeshadow and liner, and fabulous red lipstick that Rivkie admired but would never, ever, have had the guts to wear. Rivkie noticed how Chaim looked at her. His yearning was almost palpable, like that invisible energy field around the body Chinese doctors are always fiddling with.
    Delilah, who hardly ever went to class anymore and who hadn’t been in the dorm room for weeks, was all smiles and hugs and kisses on the cheek.
    “I’m having a beautiful dress made, in that building over there, on the sixth floor,” Delilah said, looking up and pointing toward a factory loft on Seventh Avenue. “We got it wholesale. First I tried it on in Saks, and then my mother got our neighbor to get it from the factory. He’s a button salesman, so he knows the wholesaler. And all I had to do was invite him to my wedding. It cost me a fraction!”
    The skin of her throat was smooth and white as she arched her neck, pointing upward at the factory loft where, even as they spoke, her Queen for a Day dress was being hand-stitched by Guatemalan seamstresses in daily danger of INS raids. Rivkie watched Chaim watching her. And when Delilah turned around and spoke to him, she saw how he bent low and leaned in close with his ear toward her, looking into the distance and smiling vaguely, as if he were listening to music.
    Delilah held out her engagement ring, a modest little thing but one that obviously thrilled her. “It’s a marquise,” she said, stroking it. “Isn’t that a nice shape? I mean, for the price of a marquise you can get a round stone twice the size.” She shook her head in delight. Only then did she remember Chaim. He didn’t seem to mind.
    “Rivkie, meet Chaim. He’s going to be a rabbi,” she said, and Rivkie could see that Delilah expected her to be astonished, and that she herself was astonished no less.

FIVE
    A h, the wedding. Minor slights that had