As cars and trucks inched along bumper to bumper on the Santa Monica Freeway, our Jeep lurched, stopped, and then did it again like a toddler learning to walk.  We were going to be late for the unveiling of Steven’s headstone.  But my wife, Nettie, sitting beside me was calm.
          She was embroidering a tallis for Steven.  She’d begun working on it soon after sitting Shiva.  These days she rarely spoke to me, as if conversation would interrupt her concentration.  The balls of silk, the embroidery needles, the tallis were always in her hands.  She didn’t actually take it to bed.  She didn’t have to.  It was her reason for staying up until it was too late to make love.
          Nettie had cut the tallis from the finest white silk cloth.  She’d knitted and then sewn on fringes.  Above the fringes with blue thread, she’d embroidered the Twenty-third Psalm in Hebrew.  And she’d sewn Stars of David where they would have lain over the suit collar of a thirteen-year-old boy.  I suppose they were there to bestow blessings, prayers passed from mother to son, protection in death from harm she couldn’t shield him from in life. 
          The tallis was soft as a baby’s breath she would say. 
          There was something special about the fringes.  They didn’t just fall from the ends like afterthoughts— they had an energy of their own, bounce, zeal. 
          She was forever perfecting it, taking out stitches, putting in new ones, and now I understood that it wouldn’t be finished until we reached the cemetery.  Steven would have been a bar mitzvah this year.  Today, Nettie was going to lay the tallis on his grave.

A year ago there was an accident on the San Diego Freeway.  We were going 45 or 50 and I was driving.  I was taking Steven and four of his friends home from soccer practice.  The boys were rowdy, nothing out of the ordinary, but I’d had a rough day and had left fires burning at the store when Nettie had called to say she couldn’t pick them up.  When they didn’t calm down after I’d told them twice to stop cutting up, I yelled, “God damn it.”
          Four or five car lengths ahead a crate fell from a truck.  Tumbling and splintering it crashed into us.  A steel rod hurtled through the windshield, impaling my boy.  No one else was seriously hurt.
          Before the impact I hadn’t taken my eyes off the road.  Yet if I’d been more focused, paying closer attention, thinking more about driving than problems at work, I could have avoided the collision.
          It wasn’t my fault according to the Highway Patrol, according to our attorney.  The truck driver was cited and his employer’s insurance company paid the policy limits.  Still I blame myself.
          Nettie never said it was my fault.  She didn’t have to.  The tallis said it all.

On the Santa Monica Freeway the stop-and-go traffic became gridlock.  The towers of Century City loomed through the smog.  Litter was scattered along the center divider: a doll without its head, a skateboard without wheels, a bent bicycle wheel.
          When the cars ahead of us began to move, I took an off ramp.  The light was green, so I accelerated.  As we neared the crosswalk a boy on a bicycle jumped the curb, popping a wheelie.  I hit the brakes; the Jeep fishtailed.  We were going 35 when we hit the bike and as we did, the boy jumped off.  The bike was crushed.
          On the pavement, I held him.  His shattered ulna and radius pierced his arm like prongs of a pitchfork.  Blood was everywhere: pooling on the street, soaking the boy, and drenching me too.  He was bleeding to death.
          Nettie got out of the Jeep calling 911.  I cradled the boy, struggling with one hand to rip off my necktie.  Nettie handed me the tallis.
          I took it and tightened a tourniquet around the boy’s upper arm.  The bleeding stopped.
          The sound of sirens grew louder.
          Nettie sat beside us and held me.