"No, I'm not Jewish," she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: "Are you?" "Yes," he said. He studied her eyes. "Oh," she said. "Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'd ask." "Yes." She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn't had been taken away, legally, by the police."