Chapter One
    As Joe strolled down Nostrand Avenue, glancing into the store windows as he passed them and enjoying the cool air, his train of thought switched tracks and he agonized over where he went wrong with Daniela. Was it the right thing to use Mrs. Gruberman? Maybe Daniela didn’t feel comfortable with her boss intruding into her personal life. Was he misreading her interest in their conversations? She seemed to be engaged when speaking with him, despite the frenetic background action typical to a Gruberman Shabbos meal. Perhaps he was someone who she didn’t even think of as a potential date and immediately relegated him to at best a friend? When he reached the station and settled into a seat on a waiting-to-depart 2 train, he concluded that he simply didn’t know, and the uncertainty soured him for the duration of his ride into Manhattan.
    Eventually the train passed through most of Brooklyn and entered the last leg of his journey in the tunnel under the East River. Joe perked up a bit as the automatic voice announced, “The Next Stop is…Wall Street.” He stood up heavily, coming to terms with having to spend the day at work instead of moping in his apartment. The subway doors opened upon their two-tone chime and for five minutes Joe joined a dense mass of commuters shuffling towards their respective jobs, breaking from the herd when it passed his building on Water Street.
    Joe waved to the doorman, who nodded in response. Nobody from his office was in the elevator so the twenty-four-second ride was shared in silence with a young guy giving off a strong whiff of the same cologne Sharon once tried to persuade him to spend way too much money for. When he reached his floor, he pulled out his electronic keycard from his wallet and opened the glass doors to the offices of Stadler & Klein. He managed to get to his little cubicle without being drawn into any conversations, and as he sat down at his swivel chair, he dropped his bag at his feet and emitted an audible sigh that he hoped nobody else heard.

Chapter Two
     As hoped, at around 9:30 they shared a taxi to her building on West End Avenue, where he told the driver to wait as he walked her to the door. Sharon thanked him for the evening and complimented him by calling him “a gentleman from beginning to end.” He smiled and waved and disappeared into the cab and from her life.
    Upstairs she went straight to her room and fell into her bed. It was her grandmother’s bed—in fact, the whole apartment had been her grandmother’s before she had a stroke and went to a home in Lakewood, New Jersey. For the last eighteen months or so, Sharon was “occupying” the space, living it up on the Upper West Side rent-free. Besides for a few additions to the décor, Sharon’s presence was only detectable by her piles of clothing on the bedroom floor and her computer on her grandmother’s vanity. She stared at the ceiling for a moment before reaching into her purse to call her mother from her cell phone. She had made the mistake of mentioning her date and no matter how late she would return home she knew her mother was waiting for her call.
    “Hi honey,” her mother said quickly after two rings. “You’re home?”
    “Yes,” replied Sharon.
    “Short date?” She sounded disappointed.
    “All first dates are meant to be short, Ima.”
    “Hmm,” was all she heard. It was enough.

Chapter Seven
Mrs. Rosenzweig emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was dressed conservatively, a styled short wig covering her hair. Joe guessed her age to be approaching fifty. She was taller than he imagined but not broad. While still drying her hands she scolded her son. “Shloimie, don’t stare. Go say hello to Joseph.” Shloimie smiled briefly at Joe before hiding in his mother’s skirts. “He’s a bit shy,” she was saying to Joe.
    “It’s fine,” said Joe.
    “So, you work for Stadler & Klein?” she asked. “You look rather young.”
    Joe felt his cheeks warm. “I finished college after three years.”
    “Oh,” she said with a nod. Then she motioned towards the table. “Please take a seat. Any chair is fine.”
    He walked over to one of the side chairs while Mrs. Rosenzweig went into the kitchen. It then hit him that he was actually doing this and the shock nearly made him miss the seat as he sat down. He didn’t know why he was so scared; he convinced himself that all he was doing was meeting a woman who might suggest to him a girl that he might meet and then might agree to marry. There were too many maybes before anything serious to be worrying this much. He was tapping on the table with his fingers as she returned with a pad of paper, a glasses case and a plastic box sized for index cards. Sitting on the end of the table, she removed the glasses from their holder and put them on, prompting Joe to sit rigidly in his chair to get himself ready for an interrogation.

Chapter Nine
“Shidduchim is an entire framework of matchmaking that follows a potential couple from the suggestion through to the engagement. It doesn’t just abandon two strangers, hoping everything works out. Certain…precautions, for lack of a better word, are taken to smooth the initial awkwardness that comes with two unfamiliar people trying to start a marriage.”
    Joe wasn’t buying it. He stopped walking. “Come on, rabbi. She’s a matchmaker, not a mediator.”
    “I would say that she’s more like a facilitator,” he clarified, gently nudging Joe towards the kitchen. “Look, any relationship has the potential to be a disaster if it doesn’t start on the right foot. All the more so with a marriage, which is meant to last forever. We have very solid traditions about how to carefully guide a couple in those initial stages, and the whole shidduch works to follow those steps. In particular, though, the shadchan works as the objective third-party who listens to each side and either moves things along or acts as the buffer in the event the suggestion is a no-go.” They reached the kitchen and Rabbi Tzvi started opening up the top cabinets, asking out loud, “Where’s the Sanka supposed to be?”

Chapter Twelve
    They ran through the rain to their car, buckled their seat belts and backed out of the parking lot in heavy silence. For ten minutes nobody spoke, the silence filled by classical piano from a local college radio station. Sharon leaned her head against the window, watching the plinking of the rain against the glass. She didn’t know whether her mother wanted to talk or whether she preferred not to, but when the concerto finished and the radio announcer started talking, her mother lowered the volume and tried to lift the mood in the car.
    “She seems to be all right,” she said pleasantly. “Your uncles don’t think so but I don’t see the issue.”
    “Does grandma not know how to talk anymore?” Tehilah asked innocently.
    There was silence for another minute. “It’s hard for her to talk,” her mother eventually answered, glaring at Sharon in the passenger seat. She knew that the little one was not to know the full extent of the situation. They changed the subject and sped along the Garden State Parkway with little traffic.
    When she got back to the apartment that her grandmother had lived in for nearly forty years, she spent a long time sitting on her bed, really her grandmother’s bed, staring blankly at the bedroom furniture. She had been a strong woman, living alone in the city for more than ten years after Sharon’s grandfather passed away, and seeing her in her current frail state left Sharon numbed and unable to do anything. For some reason she felt an urge to call Joe, but before she could Andy called her.