A small hairy dog charged out of the front door, dodged between the women on the porch, and ran straight for Terrel. With his eyes on the kite, stepping forward and backward as he kept the kite line taut, Terrel was completely unaware of the dog until it was bashing into his legs, tripping him up. Terrel lost his balance for a moment, and in the effort to keep from falling, he stepped on the dog. Not too hard, but enough to send the dog yipping and yelping toward Terrel's mom.

Now she noticed him. "What are you doing! Are you trying to kill him? You think a kite is more important than a living creature? You make me sick sometimes, Terrel, the way you step on everybody and everything around you!"

It was an astonishing display of temper. The neighbor lady was as appalled by it as Ivan was. But Terrel took it all in stride; he assumed a submissive pose, looking at the ground, no longer watching the kite. Apparently he knew—probably had learned it very young—that this was the only pose that turned away wrath. Ivan noticed, however, that behind his back he kept a firm grip on the kite string and was surreptitiously trying to keep it taut.

Terrel's mother was holding the dog now, speaking comfortingly to it, but with snide barbs at Terrel. "Did the mean boy kick you and step on you?" And then she turned her full attention back to her son. "Let go of that kite right now. You heard me! Let it go this instant! You will learn that living creatures are more important than toys." She poured so much scorn into the last word that Ivan wanted to smack her.

He knew he should keep his mouth shut, but it really was unbearable. He spoke in a loud voice, so he could be heard across the street. "Mrs. Sprewel, I was watching the whole thing, and Terrel could not have avoided what happened. The dog tripped him up before he even knew it was there."

Mrs. Sprewel glared at him like a bug in the frosting. "Thank you for your observation," she said. "I'm sure that makes poor Edwin feel much better." It took a moment for him to realize that Edwin was the dog.

Ivan tried to soften the whole thing by turning it away from the issue of dog-stomping. "Terrel did a great job of getting the kite up there on his first try—a gusty day like this, it wasn't easy."

"Excuse me, but I don't recall inviting you into this conversation," said Mrs. Sprewel. Behind her, the neighbor woman rolled her eyes.

Ruthie's car pulled up in front of the house.

Momentarily ignoring Ruthie's arrival, Ivan smiled and waved cheerily at Mrs. Sprewel. "You're quite right, Mrs. Sprewel. But I did wonder why your dog wasn't penned up or on a leash, as the law in Tantalus requires."

"He's on our property!" Mrs. Sprewel said, outraged but now on the defensive, which was all Ivan had hoped for.

"The dog wasn't on your property when it tripped your son and nearly killed him," said Ivan. "You really should watch that dog. It's a menace!" Then, with a wave but without another glance, he turned to Ruthie and greeted her with a smile as she got out of the car. Ruthie, unaware of the contretemps with the neighbors, gave him a friendly hug and a sisterly peck on the cheek.

Only after she pulled away from him and headed for the back of the car did he realize how deftly she had manipulated the greeting. Old habit had made him hold her just a little too tightly and a little too long. And perhaps she broke away a little more quickly than would have been normal, even for a perfunctory social greeting. He could almost hear the thought in her head: Take that, lover boy.

He also noticed that she was wearing a wig. How odd. Had she gone Hasidic all of a sudden? Not likely. No doubt just having a bad hair day.

Ruthie opened the trunk. Ivan stepped into the road just long enough to get the picnic hamper out, then carried it around the house into the back yard. Behind him, the dog barked. But Mrs. Sprewel wasn't yelling at Terrel anymore, and the kite was still up.

Ruth saw the wasp land on Ivan's back as he bent over the trunk to pick up the hamper. She didn't say anything to Ivan. Instead she silently invoked the wasp: Sting the bastard! Thinks he can hold me like old times, thinks he still has the right to pull me close enough to mash my breasts up against his chest and hold me there—well, that's a right I give to those who deserve it.

The wasp didn't sting him. But it didn't fly away, either. As Ruth followed him around the house, she could see the wasp crawling along his shirt. Plenty of time. Besides, if the wasp didn't sting him, she had the brownies. Plenty of itch and sting in those, if she chose to serve them to him. Not all the brownies, of course. Just two of them on which she placed the itching powder from the gypsy's bag, then put icing over them. She probably wouldn't serve those to Ivan and his bride. She had much greater hopes for the one big piece of chicken breast that she injected with the thin clear fluid from the gypsy's jar. Let Ivan eat that while Katerina was in the house on some made-up little errand and see whether he wanted to be married to the shiksa after that.

I can't believe I'm even taking these things seriously, thought Ruth. This is magic, witchcraft, superstition.

But why shouldn't it work? Witchcraft was simply an alternate way of viewing the universe, every bit as valid as science. Folkways were often wiser and more in harmony with the earth than the hard-edged metallic thinking of the engineers. Ivan used to laugh at her when she said things like that, and once he asked her if she believed that principle applied to recipes and directions. "Don't you expect directions to have a one-to-one correspondence with the highway system?" But that was just patriarchal thinking. Anything women said or thought had to be put down by men. She hadn't realized that Ivan was such a patriarchalist until after he betrayed her, but love is blind.

"Can I ask you one question?" she said as she followed him around the side of the house.

"Sure," said Ivan.

"Did you marry her as Ivan Smetski or Itzak Shlomo?"

"What?"

"Was it a Christian wedding or a Jewish one?"

He didn't answer. Which meant it was a Christian wedding. He betrayed everybody, from God to all the Jews who died in the Holocaust, and right on down to Ruth. And he didn't care. Because he was in love.

Well, what happens if you fall back in love with me? Do you switch religions again? How many times does this make? What are you, God's little tennis match, back and forth, back and forth? Double fault this time, Itzak.

"Why do you care?" asked Ivan.

For a moment she wondered what he was asking about. Then she realized he was finally answering her question from before. "Every time a Jew dies, all other Jews should mourn," she said.

He stopped abruptly and turned around. Standing there holding the heavy picnic hamper, he looked her in the eye and said, "If this is a sample of what this picnic's about, let's get this stuff back in your trunk and you can go on home."

"No, I'm—I'm sorry, Ivan, no, I'm not going to snipe at you. I was just remembering what my grandmother always said."

"My parents don't think I'm dead because I married her."

"I'm sure they don't," said Ruth. "Nor do I. I'm here, aren't I?"

"Why are you here?"

"For lunch," said Ruth. "And to try to make sense of my own life. I suddenly find myself at loose ends. I not only lost a fiancé, I also lost a very close friend. I'd like to see if I can have the friend back."

"Not like before," said Ivan. "I'm part of something else now."

"I know, Ivan. But what if she likes me, too? Then maybe I can be friends with the two of you."

He regarded her for a moment.

What, you think you have polygraph eyes? You can tell if I'm lying just by looking at me?