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with the fine lines around her eyes smooth, her gray hair blond, her skin thick and healthy instead of thin and stretched like parchment. The trauma of memory is that it never forgives you for aging. What would Katherine look like to me today? Would she be an old woman, or would she be young in my eyes, perpetually twenty-three years old? The other trauma of memory is that it can absolve you of reality if you let it, and the reality is that I’ve come to love other women, finally, a fact I’m not ashamed of.
    “I’m home,” I say.
    “I know,” Kim says, not looking up.
    “I didn’t know if you heard me come in,” I say.
    “Morris,” she says, turning pages, “your footfalls have the delicacy of a jackhammer. There are no secrets between tile floors and you.”
    I sit down beside Kim and put my arm around her and pull her close. I see the young woman she must have been. I’ve
seen photos, of course, but you never truly see someone in a photo. You see what they looked like, but not who they were. Fear shows you all the colors in a person’s skin.
    I reach down and lift up my pant leg and show her my empty holster. “I almost killed myself today. I’m not proud of that, but I wanted you to know that it won’t happen again.”
    “Jesus, Morr is,” she says.
    “I threw that gun into the Salton Sea,” I say. “Even said some prayers over it. I’m not gonna let it take me from you.”
    I know that if I look down I’ ll find Kim crying, so I stare instead at the long shadows crawling into the bunkers on either side of the twelfth hole, at the last glimmers of sunlight that peek over the rim of the San Jacinto Mountains, at the green shards of grass that grow just beyond our patio. I watch as lights flicker on inside the condos across the fairway from us, and I think that where I am now, at this very moment, with my wife beside me, with a hint of cool in the breeze that has swept by me, the smell of jasmine light on its trail, this is the memory I want to live out the rest of my years with. A moment of silent perfection when I knew, finally knew, that I’d found a kind of contentment with who I was, who I’d been, and what I’d tried so desperately to forget. I am not surprised, then, when a strong gust of wind picks up from the east and I make out the faint scent of the Salton Sea, pungent and lost and so far, far away.

Mitzvah
    T hat Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly even thought of it anymore except when ordering breakfast down at the Bagel Café. He’d sit there across from Bennie Savone, that fat fuck, watching him wolf down ham and scrambled eggs, or French toast with a steaming side of greasy link sausage, and his mouth would actually start to water, like he was some kind of fucking golden retriever. He didn’t even think Bennie liked pork all that much—sometimes Bennie would order a cup of coffee and a side of bacon and would leave the bacon uneaten, David assumed, in not-so-benign mockery—but David knew Bennie liked letting him know who was in control of the situation.
    But now, as he sat in his normal booth in the back corner facing the busy intersection of Buffalo and Westcliff, waiting for Bennie to roll up in his absurd black Mercedes that might as well have a personalized plate that said MOBSTER on it, he thought that he probably qualified as a Jew by now, if not in the eyes of God, then at least in his own eyes. It still wasn’t that he gave a fuck about religion—his personal motto, before all of this shit, had been “everybody dies”—but he probably knew far more about the Torah and the culture in general than the people who belonged to the Temple. And had
he grown up with it, David was fairly certain he would have appreciated the subtle nuance of kugel.
    After fifteen years, though, he still couldn’t get used to the idea of baked noodles, raisins, apples, and cinnamon as a fucking entrée. Now pork loin. Pork loin was