Jessica Hecht

I was in it for the benefits.

My congregation, said the rabbi, we could use some assistance this very weekend in your very building from a Gentile.

Again, he shook his head at the coincidence.

Not that it matters, he and I said in unison.

The baby laughed, she clapped her hands, and the rabbi and I laughed too.

A few days later, the rabbi came again to the bookstore.

Maggie and I had almost finished putting the last of the poetry paperbacks in boxes, and we had a little red wagon out front.

We replaced them.

Terry, her second eldest and my favorite of all of her offspring, six feet tall now and

ludicrously handsome, was to ferry this precious but humble cargo by hand across the bridge to the Ile de la Cité and then over to the left bank.

Poor kid.

Last November, he had spent the night of his 18th birthday on a restaurant's tiled floor listening to terrorists with machine guns massacring patrons in the café next door.

For weeks, Maggie wouldn't let him out of her sight, but now they were hovering around a new normal.

Today, his destination was Shakespeare and Company, one of the last English-language bookshops in Paris to endure.

It was a place where print lived, wild and free, as it once had done at a movable feast.

And writers and readers still roamed.

The bookstore was run by a young couple so lovely and kissed by God they needed to do one more thing to improve their karma, but that did not appear to stop them.

They offered to purchase Maggie's remaining stock.

The rabbi was wiping his face with a hanky.

"'Is it that hot out?'