When they arrive, he opens the door and ushers her inside. It's strange to try to look at his own home through someone else's eyes -- he wonders whether, as young Laertes did, she sees all the imperfections: the uneven shingles, the insulated second wall added after the fact, the messy kitchen filled with the signs of family cooking lessons, child-sized aprons hung over the back of chairs and measuring cups no one bothered to put away, stacks of cookbooks in Turkish and Hungarian, Persian and French. The book of Jewish holidays he and Laertes have been studying, laid out on the kitchen table, open to Sukkot.

"This is our home, and thine too now."