Free A Town of Empty Rooms by Karen E. Bender

sharply. “Jesus wasn’t born then. Besides, he wasn’t the son of God. He was — uh, just a man. A very nice man.”
    â€œRyan said his mother would get him ten packs of YuGiOh cards. Now he has more than me. He won six games of kickball and I won zero.” His face was slack with envy. “Jesus gave Ryan more YuGiOh cards than me. I want another pack of YuGiOh cards,” he said. “I want Obelisk the Tormentor. Then I will be the champion of everyone.”
    She heard the silvery yearning in his voice, the desire for mastery. “Of course,” she said, and reached over and held his hand.
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    THERE WAS, WHEN A MARRIAGE was good, a deep romance to lying beside a spouse in bed. There was a comfort in the sameness of this body beside you, of knowing the precise softness and hardness of these legs, this cheek, of feeling these arms around you in the dark, of knowing the different ways you could touch each other and the effects it would have, of knowing what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t and then did, of knowing that you each remembered the other when you were younger, more beautiful, and could, in some ways, locate that in a way no one else could, of feeling the other’s arms around your shoulders, of feeling fingers against skin, of knowing the two of you were located somewhere that seemed, briefly, safe.
    And there was, when a marriage was not good, an awareness of the brevity of one’s life when lying in bed beside a person who was angry at you. There was the lonely feeling of staring at a naked back, of wanting
to reach for the other but being afraid that you would be turned down, of feeling, beside the beloved, the startling sensation of being alone. Serena lay beside Dan and often she could not sleep.
    Sometimes she got out of bed, walked around the bluish living room. She sat on the couch and stared into the darkness; sometimes she felt as though she would disappear.
    In the morning, she took Zeb to school and Rachel to a playground across the street, and then she headed to the Temple office. She could make calls for the Ladies Concordia Luncheon, or make flyers for the Religious School Picnic, or organize the bus to take a group to see a Chagall exhibit in Raleigh. The office was a place to go; it was a little bit of money. Her mother and sister would laugh at this, her father would have told her to ask for $100 an hour or quit, but no one else was hiring her at the moment, so this was what she would do for now. She sat with Georgia and listened to who had paid their dues and who was late again; she shuffled through the requests mailed in for relatives to be mentioned in the weekly Yahrzeit; she got through her day.
    Serena did not want to admit the other reason she was there: She wanted to see the rabbi. It was not a thought she held consciously; it was a thought that shimmered, alive, under her skin. When she got out of her car to enter the synagogue, she was aware of the presence of his dented orange Buick, whether it had gotten there before she did, or not. She measured time by his schedule; she knew that he came in at nine fifteen, that he returned his phone calls the first hour, that he rushed out to visit the ailing at eleven. She attended to the day’s work but was aware of his movements in the unknowing but supremely knowing way of planetary bodies, as a planet making a slow orbit around a sun. There was a pleasure in this, this waiting; it gave a shape to her longing.
    Once he stopped her and held out his calendar. “Look at all this,” he said. “They all want me.” At 8:00 AM, he had to go to the hospital to visit Gloria Steinway, who had a broken hip, and Morris Schwartz, in a coma; at 10:00 AM — if Morris had not died, for, if so, the rabbi had to tend to his family — he had Torah study, at noon a meeting with the Ladies Concordia, at 12:30 PM a meeting with the Cemetery Committee to look into a new