Page 19 of Breakout Year

Akiva

Akiva’s house looked the same as when he’d left it last night, dustier after the professionally maintained cleanliness of Eitan’s apartment.

Don’t get used to that , Akiva thought as he attended to his plants.

His spider plant, healthy as ever, and his philodendron, which had gone yellow from too much sun.

“I’ve only been gone for a day,” he groused.

Its leaves wilted as if they resented his neglect.

His air plant was even worse off, leaves practically brittle.

The instructions said to spray it with water every few months, a direction Akiva interpreted as waiting until it had browned and then going oh, shit and trying to remember where he’d left the spray bottle .

It perked up as he applied water. What must it be like to live like that—in perpetual anticipation?

That’s melodramatic, even for you. He finished with his plants, showered, then started his laundry, momentarily grateful to be renting a house with a washer-dryer unit so he didn’t have to haul his stuff to the laundromat.

He needed to work, so he cleaned his counters, scrounged food from his cupboards, ran a few laps around the neighborhood, took another shower.

Finally, when he’d exhausted all his other options, he began to write Sue’s book.

Miss Malcha Hopkins was a liar, a con artist, a forger, and, currently, very late…

He stared at the sentence. No, that wouldn’t work.

Liar, con artist, and forger all meant relatively the same thing.

Would Malcha , a person who hadn’t existed before he wrote her down, be the type to admit to her many crimes except under duress?

Should the reader be left to determine which of these was true?

Were women commonly named Malcha in…eighteen-something-or-other, whenever the book was set? Was it too Jewish for Sue’s readers to give a character a Hebrew name? Perhaps a Moira would be more digestible. Matilda. Mary .

He could ask Eitan. Eitan, who’d liked Akiva’s book enough to read it, enough to mention it with the same enthusiasm with which he treated snack foods or playing third base or dancing.

He shouldn’t bother Eitan before the game.

Shouldn’t really be texting him at all. Don’t be a distraction —easy. Don’t let Eitan distract you —harder.

Akiva opened his texts, found his last message to Sue. What do you think of this? Then pasted his inadequate opening line.

Afternoon rolled in. Akiva got up from his desk, stretched, ignored the pop in his spine that he couldn’t afford to see a doctor about and the way his fingers brushed the low ceiling of his living-slash-dining room.

It didn’t matter; it was almost time. He showered—three was the number of showers per day that went from enthusiastic to ballplayer —and changed into synagogue clothes.

Checked his phone to make sure the money was still in his cash app account.

He’d been wearing his dark blue kippah for the last few days.

He tossed it into the drawer of them and considered his options: The satin ones stamped with dates from various b’nai mitzvot, the more practical leather and knit ones.

A rainbow one he’d bought after he’d come out to his parents, but before he’d quit playing.

Before they’d agreed that his moving out on his own would be best for everyone involved.

He clipped the kippah on, then walked fifteen minutes to his synagogue.

Shabbat wouldn’t start for another few hours—at which point he wouldn’t drive his car except in case of emergency—but the walk always helped him leave the cares of his week behind.

He ducked in the low side entrance that was the only door they kept open on weekdays for a fifteen-minute service in which he and nine other congregants davened.

He prayed the silent Amidah wrapped in his tallis, clutching the ends of the shawl in reassurance, thinking about nothing and everything and silence.

The silence didn’t last, not when Mark came over right as the afternoon service was concluding. “Look who decided to show up.” He nudged Rachel, who was packing up her own tallis next to where Akiva was standing.

“It’s only been two weeks,” Akiva protested.

“Two weeks”—now Rachel was in on it—“you don’t call, you don’t write.” She wrung her hands faux seriously in an uncomfortably close impression of Akiva’s great-aunts. “The children miss you.”

Mark and Rachel’s children chose that moment to make an appearance, a streak of Uncle Akiva like a blur before he scooped them up. “The children miss climbing me like a tree.”

“Yes, exactly.” Rachel took the older one, Noah, but left Anna, the toddler, who smacked a sticky hand against Akiva’s glasses. She smelled like a kid—like jam and playground mulch—and she couldn’t say his name but kept trying. Two weeks had been too long.

“Great, that’s decided,” Mark said. “You’re coming for dinner.”

“I didn’t bring anything.”

A snort from Rachel. She and Mark had been together since freshman year at Rutgers, when they’d looked at each other across a table at Friday night dinner and gone yes, that one. “You brought yourself. Barely. Do you even eat?”

“Not you too,” Akiva said.

“Who else is giving you trouble for not eating?” Rachel said it with a knowing glint.

“No one.” Akiva shifted Anna until she was sitting more comfortably on his hip. She yawned. Considering he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep last night, he concurred. “Really, I didn’t bring anything.”

“Come eat or else Rachel will worry that no one’s feeding you and that’s all I’ll hear about,” Mark said, and Akiva knew when he’d been outflanked, so he laughed and said, “Okay.”

Unlike Akiva’s house, Mark and Rachel’s house looked like adults were meant to inhabit it permanently: a colonial with wooden siding, four bedrooms—one for them, one for each of the children, and a guest room Akiva had slept in during the worst month of his life—the luxury of an unleaky roof.

It was also a shade of piss off the HOA chartreuse that saved it from looking just like Akiva’s parents’ old house.

Despite Mark’s protestations, Akiva showed up with two bottles of wine and a box of offseason hamantaschen, which was what happened when you showed up at the kosher bakery two minutes before they closed on Friday.

Rachel took the bag, pressed a kiss to Akiva’s cheek in greeting, fussed at Noah to get out from underfoot, and pulled a chicken from the oven, seemingly all at once. “Come look at this and tell me if it’s done,” she said.

“Let him pour some wine first.” Chava, another friend from synagogue, sat at the kitchen table, shelling peas into a white casserole dish.

“I don’t really know anything about chicken,” Akiva insisted, as Rachel tutted at the meat thermometer as if it had personally betrayed her and Noah got in the way enough that Mark chased after him.

“Akiva brought wine.” Rachel returned the chicken to the oven and skimmed her hands down her apron. “Which was unnecessary, because he already was bringing gossip.”

“Uh,” Akiva said.

“We get Instagram in New Jersey, you know.”

Chava put down the peas, opened Akiva’s wine—the finest screw-top kosher red in the store—poured herself a glass, followed by ones for Rachel, Akiva, and Mark, a fifth that she sat on the table.

“Who’s that for?” Akiva asked, stalling.

“It’s for Elijah,” Chava said. “Who do you think? Jess is coming after she gets off work, and I get the sense we might have to save some for her.”

Akiva picked up his wine and took a restorative sip.

That morning, in a fit of hungover pique, he’d vowed never to drink again.

This obviously didn’t count. Kosher wine was closer to table syrup than liquor, anyway.

He paused mid-sip at the inquisitive silence—or relative silence, anyway—emanating from the room: Mark and Rachel whispered to each other, Noah chased a ball, the three cats attempted to unionize for more food.

Anna was seated in a highchair. She beat her tiny fists against the plastic tray like a drumroll.

“I think Rachel means that I’m hanging out with someone,” Akiva said.

“Someone—ha!” Rachel sent her hands skyward. “What this one means is that he’s hanging out with Eitan Rivkin .”

Two beats of quiet, then a burst of noise.

Mark: “So that’s why you were texting me about the Cosmos.”

Chava: “Jess is gonna faint. She’s obsessed— obsessed .”

Noah and Anna both yelled because that was what the adults were doing.

Even the cats got in on it.

And Akiva had considered, briefly, what it’d be like to lie to the press, the general public, but he hadn’t thought about what it’d be like to lie to the people in this kitchen.

He took out his phone, sent a cash app payment to Mark.

It wasn’t the largest of Akiva’s debts, or the first, or even the one he’d paid back the fastest, but it was the one he most wanted to designate green in The Spreadsheet.

Mark’s phone chimed. He tapped it, then frowned. Payment declined.

“For real?” Akiva said.

Mark scooped up Noah, who was still yelling, then blew a raspberry on his belly before he set him back down.

Mark and Akiva weren’t that different in age—Mark was maybe seven years older than he was—but fatherhood had thinned his hair and gifted him softness at his waist, a coach’s authority. “Don’t change the subject.”

Akiva re-opened the app, and hell, Eitan must have just gotten a free moment with his phone.

Because there was a payment from him adorned only with an emoji of a man dancing.

For a second, Akiva wanted to decline it similarly, like if he did, it might make things with Eitan different than how they were.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said, finally.

“Are you seeing him?” Mark said.

“Yeah.” Akiva took another sip of wine. “We played together, before. In Arizona. It’s…complicated.”

Mark frowned. “Complicated?”