Free A Remarkable Kindness by Diana Bletter

for a moment to watch the surfers riding the waves. She’d never been tempted to surf—the thundering waves of Cape Cod always intimidated her—but she used to enjoy sailing, harnessing the energy of the wind. She and David had gone sailing a few times before they’d moved to Peleg, before their kids were born. Then she remindedherself not to keep thinking about her life as a swath of before cut short and an endless after.
    She crossed the parking lot and turned down the road to her house. First came the matching farmhouses that belonged to Idan Cohen and his brother, Udi. They had identical orange-tiled roofs, identical signs ( DON ’ T PANIC ! IT ’ S ORGANIC !) and almost identical-looking wives, Ora and Efrat, the four of them like matching bookends.
    Gila Salomon and her husband, Omri—beekeepers who made Garden of Eden Honey, pastries, and lotions—lived in the next house. Then came Sophie and Heinz Zuckerman’s house.
    â€œShalom, Lauren,” Sophie called, rising carefully from where she had been kneeling in the dirt.
    â€œHi, Sophie!” Lauren got off her bicycle and leaned it against the hedge. She stepped through Sophie’s gate and into her garden, planted to bloom at different times in an array of wild colors, its borders edged with bougainvillea bushes, their blossoms like butterfly wings, paper-thin and delicate magenta red.
    â€œCan I get you something cold to drink?” Sophie wore a peach-colored shirt, brown pants, and flip-flops. She was more than eighty but she still worked in the garden almost every day, her iridescent white hair tied back, her wrinkled, pale face peeking out from under a floppy straw hat.
    â€œNo, thank you.” Lauren took off her helmet, brushing some stray hairs from her damp face. “I just came back from Nahariya and all I want to do is lie down. I would have thought the weather would be cooler by now.”
    â€œWe’re in the Middle East, my dear,” Sophie said. “I alwaysthink about how if the Nazis hadn’t come to power, I’d probably be living in a fancy old house in Strasbourg, sitting around playing cards with friends.”
    â€œAnd if David hadn’t come to America . . .” Then Lauren stopped. If she hadn’t broken up with Hunter, he might have asked her to marry him and she might be living in a fancy old house, maybe even in Beacon Hill. Why hadn’t she stayed with Hunter? He was nice. Yet she’d wanted one last fling with an exotic somebody before she devoted the rest of her life to playing Scrabble and sailing with a bunch of Republicans.
    Lauren remembered the precise moment she’d seen David at the elevator, leaning against the wall, huddled over some hospital charts, one leg bent up. With a pair of tortoiseshell glasses set on his boxy nose, he looked like a guy who could talk about books and still know how to fix things; and his olive skin and mop of black curls gave him a naturally mysterious appearance that all-American Hunter could never have. Lauren had suddenly veered from the stairwell despite her mother’s admonishments and headed in his direction. One step to the left: that was all it would have taken. One extra step. Even Lauren’s old ballet teacher, Madame Magar in Brookline, could have told her that.
    â€œLife is full of surprises.” Sophie’s voice was gentle.
    â€œI know a thing or two about surprises.”
    â€œBad surprises, but also good ones.”
    â€œI hope so.” Lauren wiped away a trickle of sweat from under her eye.
    â€œIt took me a lot of years to get used to the heat.”
    â€œSo by the time I’m eighty-five?”
    â€œYou’re in luck.” Sophie smiled. “I’m only eighty-three. Speaking of which, I have to give you something for the burial circle, would you mind waiting?”
    Lauren sat in the shade by some purple-and-yellow pansies, their fragile, silken faces turned up