Michael wraps his arm back around her comfortably. “Yeah,” he says. “Actually Rabbi Kalina is sort of like you. Really smart, kinda quiet. He’s known me pretty much my whole life.”
There are other people in the congregation who’ve been around just as long, but even as Morris made various friends among them, Michael remained isolated, and he now has no interest in letting any of them know what’s happened to him. They’d only repeat his words to his father anyway, and he has no intention of letting Morris know where he lives now.
“That was the only part of going to temple I ever really cared about, talking to him. When I was a kid, that’s how Pop got me to go without putting up a fight. ‘Do you wanna see Rabbi or not?’ He always threatened to tell him about all the bad stuff I did, too.”