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orphanage? Was she also lying on her application? Why would anyone make up such an absurd lie? And she didn’t strike him as a liar. She had to have the wrong word. She meant some other kind of home.
    Eyal set her application to the side as if it were no use. “Claudette, if you don’t mind me asking, what brings you to the kibbutz?”
    Claudette described how she ended up on the kibbutz in a hushed voice, free from emotion, except perhaps discomfort. For the last seven months she had lived with her half sister Louise while continuing to work in the orphanage’s laundry. When Louise got married last week, her brother-in-law, who had once volunteered on a kibbutz, insisted she should do it. He promised she could do laundry here in exchange for room and board. Just like in the orphanage. Adam imagined the starry-eyednewlyweds who didn’t want this weirdo hanging around their honeymoon nest. They must have been giddy with relief when they realized they could pawn her off on the kibbutz for a while. Claudette finished: “And I supposed it couldn’t hurt to be where Jesus had His ministry.”
    Eyal said he was very sorry, but they didn’t need anyone full-time in the laundry, that they would have to think of something else for her to do, and picked up Adam’s application. Adam straightened, clasped his hands.
    â€œHonestly, I can’t read a word of this. I can’t even make out your name. Alan?”
    â€œSorry. My penmanship needs work. My name’s Adam.”
    â€œAdam. It looks like you went to college for . . . what was it?”
    â€œHistory. I majored in New York City history at Baruch College, which is one of the best schools in the City University. That high school I went to, Stuyvesant, it’s the best public high school in the city, maybe the country. Three Nobel Prize winners went there.”
    These weren’t entirely lies. He had gone to Stuy, but they wouldn’t readmit him after he got back from rehab. As for Baruch, he was about to declare himself a history major when he was suspended that last time. He did love those history classes, and actually got an A- in “NYC: The People Who Shaped the City.” The only reason he hadn’t yet declared his major—how stupid it seemed now—was because he had worried that it was kind of pathetic to be a historian, that people who wanted to be great became great, and people who couldn’t become great became historians and studied great people.
    â€œNot much I can do with history. What about jobs?”
    He’d been fired from many shitty jobs—painting apartments, moving furniture, scooping ice cream—usually within a month.
    â€œWell, I’ve had a lot of internships and other jobs, but—” What had his grandfather done on the kibbutz? He thought hard. “Cotton! What about picking cotton? My grandfather was on this kibbutz for a couple of years after the war, and that’s something he did.”
    â€œYour grandfather was on Sadot Hadar?” Eyal raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Sadly the cotton fields are long gone. Even with the machines we couldn’t compete with India, where people pick for seventy cents a day. Seventy cents a day—wrap your head around that. There’s a plastics factory now where the cotton used to be, which means we now have to compete with China.”
    Eyal massaged his forehead. Behind him a moth fluttered along the wall, past an oversized calendar scrawled with notes and scratched-out notes. Not a single day blank. Again, not the kind of calendar Adam would have expected on a kibbutz.
    â€œI have an idea.” Eyal waved his pen at Claudette. “You worked with sick people, yes? We have an old woman on the kibbutz who’s very sick, but she won’t stop working. The problem is—and it breaks my heart to say this—wherever she goes, she’s more a nuisance than help. I try to send her