He stared at the silver tube of lipstick in the toilet water. Goddamn it. It had happened in slow motion, the merest bump of his towel-wrapped hip against the sink, itself an overflowing steamed-up mess of jars, bottles, and strange metal wands. All he’d done was reach for the faucet and there it went, right off the edge and plunk into the toilet before he could even stretch out a hand. Now it was lodged in the stained porcelain hollow at the very bottom of the bowl. Of course it was. Avery looked around the tiny bathroom in dismay. What was all this makeup, anyway? It was like a fucking pharmacy in here. Well, there was only one thing to do, and it wasn’t going to help to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

He plunged his hand in, almost to the elbow, fishing and fumbling, and then he had it. Now what? His first instinct was to wrap it in a wad of toilet paper and bury it in the trash. How could she miss it, really, with all these other lookalike lipsticks? He’d get her another one! Replace it, later tonight, and she’d never know. The dime-size label on the bottom read only garbo. What did that mean? And what if it was a favorite? She was so particular about her outfits, not just for performances but planning costumes for herself every day, a shifting thrift-store parade, calibrated to minute changes in mood or plan or the music playing on the stereo. What if, stumbling into the bathroom after him, Nona started to brush her teeth and then thought, You know what would be perfect for today? Some Garbo lipstick.

At the thought of her, naked and warm in bed right now, on the other side of the wall, buried under a tangle of pillows and blankets, that soft rumble of her breathing—Avery slowly closed his eyes, still holding the tube in his dripping hand. He was so close to climbing back in there with her, fuck it all, to sleep and fuck and sleep again, until it turned dark outside and then they could go out to that all-night Vietnamese place, for a burning shared bowl of pho, and sticky rice balls wrapped in lettuce, and mango pudding. Except that’s pretty much what he had done yesterday. And most of the week before, stints at work the only exception.

“This is it, Avery,” his mother had said yesterday, when she finally reached him. He had managed to buy himself a few weeks, citing minutiae of job and apartment searches, but the excuses were running out. “I’m not kidding. If I don’t hear that you’ve been out there by—”

“What kind of evidence do you want? Photographs? Sworn statements?”

There was a slight pause, and for a moment Avery wondered if he’d gone too far. “Just go see him, all right?” As usual, as soon as his mom’s voice took on that tired, overwhelmed tinge, Avery conceded. He could barely hear her as she went on: “There’s a lot going on that I can’t even…Just go see him.”

With the happy thought that the sooner he left Nona, the sooner he could return, Avery rinsed and soaped the lipstick, drying it on a corner of his towel. Uneasily, he dropped it back into the mess of cosmetics, but not before giving it a quick sniff. Nope. No toilet smell whatsoever.

Nona’s bedroom was three unevenly cut pieces of Sheetrock banged together against the apartment’s main wall, not much bigger than her double bed. To open the bottom drawer of her overflowing dresser, you had to tug the bed out of the way first, the foot of which served as desk chair, coffee table, and laundry hamper all at once. And then there were the teetering stacks of CDs and records on every surface, everything from 1950s opera to hip-hop demos made in garages. Nona’s stereo, wedged underneath a rickety night table on the floor beside her bed, was a shockingly expensive brand from Germany, probably worth more than the entire contents of the rest of the apartment. Her thick-cushioned headphones were invisible, buried under the pillows somewhere, but the sight of the cord trailing down from the bed sent a flash-shiver through him—last night, toward the end, he’d put them on Nona just to watch her face, eyes shut and mouth open. (Avery had to believe it wasn’t just the music that had made her writhe like that.)

He dropped his towel and climbed on top of her.

“Oof. Already?”

“Don’t go anywhere,” he whispered. “Don’t even get dressed.”

Nona raised her head an inch, sniffing dramatically, and then dropped it back down. “My God, you read my mind.”

“No. No way.”

“It smells divine. I can’t wait.”

Avery pulled on the same jeans he’d been wearing for a week. “You’re dreaming.”

“Avery’s famous popovers. With some of the clover honey. You’re a prince among men.”

“Nona, these trains only run on the hour! And getting from here to Grand Central…Tomorrow, I promise I’ll make them. Every day next week!” But even as he scanned the torn-apart room for his wallet, his shirt, he was whipping through ingredients in his head. What a sucker. “Eggs?” Eggs were fast. “Pepper and onion omelet?”

But Nona just shook her head, burrowing deeper. “I love that popover smell,” she said sleepily.

Christ! There was barely enough flour, but only one egg, and the muffin tin was still caked with blackened crust edges. Avery dumped the tray in a sinkful of hot soapy water, pulled on his shoes, and fished around in Nona’s bag for the keys. Outside it was oddly cool for late August, and, grateful, he ran two blocks over to the bodega, where he bought mildly suspect eggs and butter and, last minute, a bunch of pale-pink tulips. Into the corner garbage can went the cellophane wrapper and five of the six flowers, and then he took the stairs three at a time back up to Nona’s apartment.

Seeing Thomas, Nona’s sometime roommate, in the kitchen slowed him, though. They’d met once, but Thomas pointed a finger at him and put on a puzzled face anyway.

“Mm…Avery, right? Good. Sorry to…interrupt.” He smiled, eyebrows raised, at the dishes and the flower. “I’m just dropping my things. Off to Seattle later today.”

“No, that’s cool. I have to run in a second, anyway.” He tried not to be self-conscious, cracking the eggs, whisking in flour, setting the empty buttered pan to smoke away into the blackened, tiny oven. Thomas was sorting through mail, leaning against the counter. He taught cultural studies at NYU, Nona said. They’d been friends forever. Gay, obviously, so that was all good. But why the whole roommate setup, when the two of them were—well, old? Thirty-whatever, at least. They’d lived together for years in a series of apartments across Brooklyn, and once in Queens—eesh, Nona had shuddered about this—to end up here, in this reconfigured industrial space in Williamsburg. Thomas traveled, Nona explained. She hardly ever saw him.

Avery wished that was the case this morning.

“Is it part of a tour? For your book, I mean?”

Thomas looked up, polite and perplexed. “Hmm?”

“Going to Seattle…to sign books, and all that?” Avery had seen Thomas’s book—had flipped through it while on the can, actually. The cover image was a curvy nude dancer, posing while a black bar covered her eyes; the title was Queering the Show: Gender, Economics, and Burlesque in Turn-of-the-Century New York. For a book about strippers, though, it was pretty boring.

“What? Oh, right. Yes, wouldn’t that be something.” Thomas chuckled, although Avery wasn’t aware of making a joke. He poured the oily batter into the hot pan in precise dollops. With a pen, he wrote, “STOP! DO NOT OPEN OVEN! TURN DOWN TO 350 DEGREES. TAKE PAN OUT AFTER 22 MINUTES,” on the back of one of Nona’s flyers, and taped it to the oven’s grimy handle. Thomas disappeared into a back room. Working quickly, Avery fiddled with his watch alarm—avoiding the time—washed the bowl and whisk, and wiped out the sink. He set out a plate, the sticky honey container, and the tulip in a jelly jar.

Nona’s wrist was tiny and brushed with fine dark hair; he kissed its inside and buckled his watch on her arm as tight as it would go.

“Listen,” he said, waggling her arm back and forth. “Six minutes. When it beeps, get up and go into the kitchen. No kidding. Unless you want the fire department.”

Nona pulled her arm away and rolled over. But first, she blew him a kiss, eyes still closed.

He had it so bad. Hard to believe how bad it was, how deep he was in, after—what?—three weeks.

On the train, Avery pushed his knees against the seat back in front of him, feet dangling. He’d been carrying Cormac McCarthy’s new paperback around forever, but couldn’t seem to get past the first dozen pages. Outside the nicked and clouded plastic of the window, metal bridges rumbled by, and the upper parts of Manhattan, and then the Bronx. They crossed highway after highway and then rolled steadily past high-rise buildings, thick forests of dark brick interspersed with paved plazas, empty green benches, neon-lit liquor stores and dry cleaners. Avery rubbed his thumb across his abraded lips, felt the ache in his groin. He was miserable; he was elated.

He hadn’t come to that first show, but he’d tracked her band down the next week. And though he would definitely have said that their first few times together were good—great, even—it took a little while for him to realize what was happening. Standing in the back of the crowd, Avery had fought some initial disappointment while Nona howled and swore and stomped through a set or two of standard-issue indie-grunge rock. Yes, she was hot, even in that crazy 1940s-style getup, a boxy gray suit and pompadour hair—a wig, he found out later—and yes, he liked how she met his eyes from the stage. But the overall scene was blah, and those guys in her band were poseurs. Afterward, he’d milled around during load-out and then he and Nona had ended up at his place, and the next night too: standard, right? Nothing special.

Idiot, Avery on the train mouthed to himself, that old version of himself already gone and unrecognizable.

There were moments, though, where he guessed something was up: her dreadlocks splayed across his naked stomach (like a tarantula—a thought that coincided with a sudden, baffling orgasm); the way she set down her glass on the bar and left it there for the rest of the night, having noticed that Avery was drinking only water; the long, patient 2 am conversation she’d had with this guy on the street, some cracked-out bum, about her own shaky finances and why she had a policy against giving out change on the street, and detailed directions to this one shelter she knew wasn’t too insane. She listened seriously to this person. She nodded and asked questions as he went on and on with his crazy spiel, all these Swiss bank-aliens out to get him—she held a hand up to Avery when he tried to interrupt—Avery who’d wanted nothing more than to hand this guy a five and tug Nona away, back to himself.

So, there were moments. Hints. Still, he was caught off guard when it came together, all at once—he was blindsided when the fuse lit and hissed inside him, unmistakable.

Their fourth night together, they were sitting up in her bed, naked, facing each other, eating sliced plaintains he’d sautéed with brown sugar, and chocolate truffles from the bodega, each one wrapped in crinkly blue-and-silver plastic.

“Your mom taught you to cook?” Nona asked, sugar grains dripping down her wide, soft belly.

“No. I mean, she loves food and we always had good stuff around, growing up, but…no.”

“Who, then? Your grandma?”

“Actually, it was this guy Luther.” Nona raised her eyebrows, waited for more. All of a sudden, though, Avery was stuck. He couldn’t figure out what it would mean to her, or what it would sound like, out loud—all the drug stuff, and the tired, bad way everything had gone down—here in this naked woman’s bed in this strange new city. Was this really the first time he’d told someone who didn’t already know? Maybe not, but it felt like that. He waded in carefully. “He was head of the kitchen at this place I was at for a year—”

“This place…?”

“Yeah.” Avery smiled helplessly, still stuck.

“This place being—rehab?” Her face was calm, watching him. Avery nodded, and then she did, too.

Nona considered the two chocolates left. She weighed them carefully, one in each hand, and then made her decision. “What kind of food did he cook?”

Avery started to speak, and then stopped. There it was, full and clear, what she’d done for him just now: accepted his story, accepted him. “Well, everything. He was in charge of meals for fifty, sixty people at a time, so a lot of it was just volume and turnaround. And timing.”

“No individual lemon soufflés. No rack of lamb.”

“Right. More like shepherd’s pie or spaghetti casserole. And it was in Virginia, this place, so we did all the usual Southern food, everything with ham hocks. But he’d been through a lot, this guy—” Avery remembered the two scars along Luther’s thick black neck, the time some whiny backwoods addict snarled some racist shit and the way Luther had so calmly, almost gently, set down a stock pot and pinned the kid against the wall with one huge forearm.

“This was like his kingdom, you know? Being responsible for everything we all ate. He took pride in it. And when it was a good dinner, when all the serving plates would come back empty, Luther would be so pumped. Like, here was this hard-core black guy, usually all impassive and intimidating. But then he’d go around chest-bumping us all when the chili came out perfectly. I don’t know. Nobody wanted to be assigned to the kitchen, because it was fucking hot in there, and there was no way to get out of all this shit that had to be done, every day…but I really got into it, after a while.”

“Chili. Is it wrong to want chili in August?”

“I’ll make you the best black-bean chili you’ve ever had.” He reached over to put both hands around one of her thighs. “It’s so hot you’ll sweat.”

“But that’s not the kind of the thing you usually make. Right?”

“I don’t mind a good bowl of chili.”

“No, I mean, where’d you learn all the glammed-up stuff? You know, the wrapped-up figs and all that.”

Avery blushed. Yes, that antipasti plate he’d made for her had been overkill, six different fussy preparations, including a half ounce of culattello from Mott Street he’d stood in line forty-five minutes to buy.

“Toward the end, Luther let me mess around on my off hours. Obviously, I didn’t have much in the way of ingredients. He did let me use his knives, though. That was huge.”

“Because of rehab. The rules, and so on.”

“Because a chef doesn’t let anyone touch his knives!” It occurred to Avery that Luther himself would have scoffed at the term chef. “That’s sacred shit.”

“Boys and their toys,” Nona said. She lay back against a pillow. “So what are you going to do with all that?”

Avery leaned over and licked sugar off one of her palms, chasing it between her fingers with his tongue. “What am I going to do with all what?”

She grabbed his jaw and shook his face gently. “With food. With your cooking. What do you want?”

“You mean, do I have a ‘life plan’ or something?” The words came out harsh and scornful, despite himself.

Nona let go. “Yes, that’s what I mean, shithead.”

“I don’t have that kind of—it’s different for you, with your band. I—”

“That band is not what I do. That’s not my real work.” Nona drew herself up, an angry queen.

“Okay, all I meant was—”

“Avery. This is when you say, ‘so what is your real work, Nona?’”

“No, definitely. I mean, yeah. Of course I want to know.”

Nona hesitated.

“Please,” Avery said.

“All right. But you’ll want to back up some.” Avery, confused at first, scooted himself up against the wall on the far side of the bed. Nona closed both eyes and breathed deeply, humming. “Give me a minute, all right? I hate the way it sounds, when I describe it. I’ll just show you.”

He waited. Nona seemed to have gone deep inside herself, the way she sometimes did when they were fucking. Was she meditating? Was she getting ready to levitate? The seconds ticked past, and still she sat there, frowning now, with the effort of those long, thrumming breaths. Avery had no idea what was coming, but he understood two important things: first, that he didn’t care. At all. Anything she wanted to show him, he was open to. The second was that there were few better ways he could think of to spend a silent moment, than sitting here in this bed, across from this woman, strange and glorious and naked.

Then she opened her mouth and a blast of sound hit him. It was hard to understand how she had instantly summoned so much noise, or how it had erupted from her without warning, a low-toned foghorn that shifted into a series of undulating cries, before he had a chance to make sense of it. The sounds ping-ponged off the walls, as if Nona propelled each and then caught it—swallowed it—on the rebound. His heart pounded. While she sang—if that was what she was doing—she put her hands on various parts of her body: the sides of her waist, two fingers flat against the base of her throat, and then a fist pressed deeply into the hollow of her ribs. In their lovemaking, of course Avery had already noticed—had closely, carefully noticed—the tiny tattoos sprinkled in clusters of blue and black across Nona’s skin: the whorled fingerprints, the Roman numerals, one silver exclamation point. He hadn’t guessed they might have some other purpose than decoration, but now he saw where she beat gently upon them as a prompt, or a counterpoint, to her singing.

Hard to believe the sheer amount of sound that gushed around him, or how she could erase it all in one instant, the way she did when the song was finished, although it wasn’t at all clear that what he’d just heard was a song. Avery felt like he’d been schooled. He was chastened, both then and—replaying the moment in his mind—on the train just now pulling into Hartfield. Everything she’d just shown him about desire lit up his own default mode of studied indifference, and now he glimpsed what the opposite looked like.

“Holy shit,” he had said, and Nona laughed. “That was…wow.”

“Wow?”

“Um…” He’d wanted to say something smart, something that would match the intensity of her performance. Something that would make him her equal. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”

“I don’t doubt it. It’s part of this longer piece I haven’t finished yet.”

Avery wanted to know everything. What was it called? Where did she learn to do that? Who was she? But instead of saying a thing, all he’d done was reach for her.

 

“Do you have any idea how much you stand to inherit?”

Jerry’s voice boomed in the study thick with heavy furniture, dark drapes, and whirling dust motes. Avery blinked; suddenly he was very, very tired. He’d hardly been in the house—Jesus, this house was huge—for more than a few minutes. Jerry’s wife (he couldn’t think of what to call her) had ushered him right upstairs, where his grandfather was waiting behind a desk, like he was there for an interview. And it turned out that maybe he was.

“Ballpark figure, you mean?” Avery tried a smile. “Possibly…enough to buy a ballpark?”

“There are two things a man should never joke about, and one of them is money.”

Give me a break, Avery thought. He was here, wasn’t he? He showed up, did his duty, was here for the chatting and the visiting and this whole forced getting-to-know-you scheme, so…Come on, old man. Ease up. Avery’s memories of his grandfather were few and scattered: endless childhood Christmas dinners, getting dragged to some big award presentation, watching Jerry on TV. Then he was in high school, caught up by those first waves of drinking and snorting, and what did grandparents have to do with anything? But now, in the hot study, he suddenly remembered one other night, just after his father had left them, when his grandfather had put his hand on his head—the two of them alone in the foyer—and called Avery’s dad a low-down bastard. Did that really happen? Avery had been barely seven when his parents split. Still, it lingered like the truth: the weight of that hand on his head, the whispered, confiding tone, man to man. Low-down bastard.

Avery snorted, thinking about it.

“What’s that?” Jerry said. “Something funny?”

“Nothing.”

Through the big windows behind the desk, he could see workers moving around the yard. The ping of tools—sledgehammer on a metal stake—and the shouts from the men drifted faintly up into this stuffy room. Avery fidgeted in his high-backed chair. Hard to believe he’d traded Nona’s bed for this.

“Whatever happened to college? Didn’t like hitting the books? Wasn’t for you?”

“That’s right.” Jerry waited, but Avery stuck it out. He saw his grandfather soften a little.

“I’m not much for schooling, myself. When I was your age—what are you now, twenty-three?”

“Twenty.”

“By the time I was twenty-two I had been to war. And back, though no real credit to me there. Then, in three more years I had founded my first company.”

Avery nodded. He thought there was much more polite interest in his expression than the matter warranted; the fact of Nona—Nona in bed—made him indulgent.

“That was with your great-uncle, my brother. Frank was his name. He was two years older than me, but a lot of folks would have guessed the opposite. He was a joker, Frank. A lot like you, maybe.”

“Is that him?” Avery pointed to a small framed black-and-white photograph on the wall, of a stern young man in a bowler hat posed in front of a snowy brick wall. Jerry twisted himself around with effort.

“No, that’s my father. Only picture I have of him. Here’s Frank.” Jerry handed Avery another frame, this one from his desk, and Avery glanced quickly at the image of two brothers, each with one arm around the other’s shoulders. The shorter man was clearly Jerry, bullish and thickset. Frank was taller, a bit lanky, and he was grinning at something happening outside the frame, while Jerry stared dead straight at the camera.

“Frank was a college man. For a while. He did two years at Notre Dame, and we got a lot of Chicago contracts out of that. We never said he didn’t have the degree. We just never said.”

Avery set the photograph carefully back on the desk and turned it to face his grandfather. There was a resemblance in that photo that unnerved him. He scanned the rest of the photographs on the desk and realized, even through the faded, out-of-focus images, that there had been—that there were—other men who looked like him. Who were related to him. It sparked a small shock of recognition, these old pictures, one that changed the old man sitting across from him: there is blood here.

“Frank liked a good prank,” Jerry was saying. “One night in the dining hall, he and two fraternity brothers came in late, banged around loudly, pretending to be drunk. Everyone was shocked. Cleared out of their way. Well, the three of them sit down at a table and start to eat noisily, attracting lots of attention. Now, one fellow had somehow hidden a bag of beef stew inside his shirt, and all of a sudden he pushes away all his dishes and starts moaning, ‘I’m sick, I think I’m gonna be sick.’”

Avery nodded, as he seemed expected to do.

“Then—whack!” Jerry thumped at his chest with the flat of his hand. “He spills it all over the table and makes a big show of getting sick. There’s a horrified silence. Frank and the other fraternity man call out, ‘It’s all right! Don’t worry, folks, we’ll take care of it!’ Then they picked up their spoons and ate up every bite of that stew.”

“Oh, God,” Avery said, and laughed for real. “They were legends, right?”

“Just about,” Jerry said. He straightened the photo of Frank, aligning it with all the other frames. “That was one of his favorite stories, for years and years.”

But the story, and the awkward silence that followed, brought a new feeling into the room.

Avery said slowly, “So I’ll miss out on all that. College hijinks, and stuff.” He waited to see what Jerry would say. Was this little tale about drinking more loaded than it seemed? Would he now be subjected to probing questions about his city activities and an old-school lecture about sobriety? Obviously, his grandfather had to know about his stint in rehab, although they’d never directly discussed it. They’d never directly spoken about anything, Avery thought, that he could remember. At least since that childhood moment in the foyer. Low-down bastard.

Avery set his face, hard and still, but Jerry was frowning at something else, and didn’t answer right away.

“What?” he said. “So, you been talking to your mother about all this?”

“About what?”

“TrevisCorp. What she’s up to. She tell you to come by and make nice? She figures you have a better shot now?”

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about, Grandad.”

“You don’t.” Jerry fixed him with a look. “What did she tell you to say to me?”

Avery was baffled. “Nothing, she just—” Wasn’t he supposed to be here? Wasn’t that the deal?

“Eight hundred, forty-five thousand.” Jerry rested his elbows on the chair’s arms, and his hands on his stomach.

“What?”

“That’s what goes to you, when I die. Doesn’t include your shares of stock, the futures, or various other holdings. But that’s the picture as it stands right now.”

“Okay. But…that’s a long way off. Right?” Avery wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say thank you, or what. “Maybe I should get going.”

“This all gives me an idea,” Jerry said. “You and I should get to know each other, even if your mother—I mean, especially since your mother…”

Avery nodded, half out of his chair. “Sure. That sounds great.” He wasn’t sure what Grandad was talking about, but his ever-closer exit was buoying his spirits.

“Talking about Frank, to you just now. Well, it’s a little…” His grandfather paused. Avery sat down again. “It brings me back. I’d forgotten that, about the beef stew.”

“Good story.” There was a steady drilling noise coming from outside the window, but Avery couldn’t see the workers anymore. He felt a surprise surge of empathy and goodwill for this older man. Its driving force was Nona, although in the moment Avery could only half recognize that. Suddenly, he found himself wanting to be a comfort to Jerry. Suddenly, he wanted to be there for him. “And that other thing? You know, the two things a man can’t joke about?” Jerry was blank. “Women. Right? I mean, it has to be.”

“Women,” Jerry echoed, agreeing. He let a small grin slip free.

This is good, Avery thought. I can do this. Yeah: we’ll be all close and shit. Now just get him back to Nona.

Then Jerry thumped the desk. “All right then.” Avery realized they had just sealed some kind of deal. “So, we’ll get started. Same time next week?”

“Uh—actually I work, and Sundays are usually pretty busy, so…”

“Your office is open on weekends?”

“It’s a restaurant. Called Pita Pie. On lower Broadway.” Each thing he said made Jerry look less pleased. “I’m doing some prep cooking there.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be on the weekend. My schedule’s wide open now, as you can see.” In response, Avery smiled weakly. “You can call me and say what day’s best. And bring some kind of recorder.”

“Recorder?”

“Tape recorder, something like that. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to get some things down on paper. About the company—about my life. It’ll be important for you, down the road.”

“Oh,” Avery said unhappily.

“You can type up whatever we record and we’ll just take it week by week. All right, then?” Jerry slapped the desk, both hands.

“I don’t have a computer, or anything like that.”

“What?”

“It’s true.” Avery feverishly hoped this would be a big enough obstacle to the whole you-can-type-it-up plan, but Jerry was opening a desk drawer. He watched his grandfather write out a check and slide it across the desk to him. Twenty-five hundred.

“That should buy one of those small digital recorders, too. Like journalists use. Let me know what day next week.” Jerry walked Avery to the door, and nodded him toward the stairs. Avery was still holding the blue piece of paper that said $2500. Just to the right of his own name.

Downstairs, Winnie—she insisted, laughing, that he call her that when Avery visibly hesitated over her name—seemed perplexed when he turned down an offer to drive him to the train station. Standing in the kitchen doorway, Avery had fumbled through his wallet—Grandad’s check stuffed in there now—looking for that little train brochure; he was sure he’d grabbed one in Grand Central. But Winnie knew the Sunday train schedule off the top of her head, and recited it to him, arms crossed, smiling a little at something Avery couldn’t guess. Strange, but whatever. She probably didn’t have a lot else going on. No, he didn’t want a ride, thanks. Yes, another soda would be great. Avery had to get out of there.

He had to get out of there, but Jesus-fucking-Christ, this kitchen. Six-burner stove, immaculate. Two pristine convection ovens. A soundless freezer the size of his closet. And the island—a prep area set off from the counters, four square feet of two-inch maple butcher block. It had its own tiny fucking faucet and sink. Perfect. He had the heft of an imaginary knife in his hand, and he was aching to dice an onion on that butcher block.

Winnie caught him looking around. “Or how about a snack? You have time. Let me see—” She started opening drawers and cabinets, and Avery saw the bags of salt-free pretzels, the rice cakes, and boxes and boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes.

“No, really. I’m fine. But…can I ask you something?”

Something in his voice made Winnie stop completely and turn to him.

“Have you heard of Garbo? I mean, is that a kind of makeup brand, or just the name of a lipstick, or what?”

“Garbo?” Winnie looked so helplessly lost that Avery just said forget it. He was embarrassed.

And soon he was running, lame soccer sneakers slapping against the pavement, swooping in a glorious burst of awkward, breath-heaving movement down a long, winding hill, past all sorts of suburban folk doing their Sunday suburbs thing. They glanced at Avery, but he didn’t have time to say much since he was running. Literally running, with no hurry and no point, a pointless gorgeous action it seemed he hadn’t enjoyed in years, and why was that? Maybe he’d buy some running gear. Maybe he’d join one of those groups and run around Central Park every morning. It felt like laughing, this pell-mell formless pounding; it felt like being a little kid. Avery could smell himself, rank and unwashed, but that heat rising up from his chest and armpits just merged with the way his feet gripped the sidewalk and the swish-sound of cars whipping by. He’d be early at the station. He’d probably have to wait a while for that next train back to the city, back to Brooklyn. To Nona. That didn’t matter, though, not one bit, and Avery ran on and on down the hill into town.