I came home eleven months early without telling anyone and found my wife sitting against a wall with her head shaved and her face bruised, while my mother shouted at me to throw her out. I didn't argue. I looked at what had actually been broken in that room, and then I asked my wife for the notebook.

We were saving. I was away nine months out of twelve and it made no sense to pay rent on a place she would be alone in, and my mother offered, and in 2018 my mother was pleasant about it, and by 2020 she was not.

There is a thing that happens to a woman who lives in her mother-in-law's house while her husband is away, and it does not have a name, and it is not one big event.

It is that she does not have a room she is allowed to be in during the day. It is that she starts eating after. It is that by the fourth year she is sewing for eleven customers out of a back room and handing over three hundred dollars a month for her keep out of it and nobody has ever called it rent.

Tova told me about that four years late, in that bedroom, after the notebook, and she said, "I didn't want you worrying about a kitchen when you were where you were."