If it had been up to Avery—and why wasn’t it, when he was cooking the whole meal?—turkey wouldn’t even be on the table. But when he’d floated that idea past Winnie, she’d looked so aghast that he’d immediately backed off. They weren’t ready for wild boar with quenelles in Hartfield, at least on Thanksgiving, or goose livers in Sauterne. So, he’d signed on, reluctantly, for the whole boring usual: they’d get their damn turkey, the driest form of meat known to man, and their sweet potatoes and cranberry salad, and two kinds of pie for dessert. (Yes to rum-spiked pumpkin but an emphatic no to apple. Avery had to draw the line somewhere. He would not bake a fucking apple pie.) Still, he was working overtime to subvert anything he could, even if no one would notice. The sweet potatoes were whipped with lemon juice and then layered with Canadian bacon, Granny Smith apples, and—here, he knew he was pushing it—tiny nuggets of jellied goose fat. The cranberries were there, tossed with orange peel, but also with minced baby jalapeno peppers, and a few dashes of some Catalan spice blend he’d ordered online. There would be a few other surprises too. It was unlikely, Avery thought, that anyone would have an allergic reaction.

A few weeks ago, on one of his Hartfield outings, just after Winnie had invited him to Thanksgiving, she’d asked his opinion on whether they should all go to the 4:15 buffet at the Waugatuck Club, or whether she should have dinner catered by something called “If You Can’t Take the Heat.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Avery had said, bleary from two hours of listening to Jerry go on about corrugated box technology. “Have you seen your oven? Both of your ovens? I could make a turkey sub in here that would be better than anything at that place.”

So that’s what had started it all, with some Sure, sure, I’ll help out and then No, don’t buy any produce there to I’ll take care of it, all of it. He’d been shopping for the past day and a half, borrowed his roommate’s car and packed it full of food, and had driven out here at—he still couldn’t believe this—seven in the morning. Avery couldn’t help it. When it came to food, food that he would be eating or just in the presence of, he couldn’t abide any interference or outside opinions. Plus, Nona was coming, and it was going to be weird enough to have her see all this—the house, this whole suburban scene—for the first time, without his having to choke down rubber turkey meat at the same time. But there was something else. Avery could tell from Winnie’s nervous, probing questions about Thanksgiving—Unless you’re planning to go home? For whatever your mother will be planning?—that she didn’t know what he knew.

“Need some help?” Winnie wobbled into the kitchen, this incredible fucking kitchen with every single pro detail in place. Who the hell lived here before Grandad? Mario Batali? Even though it was just noon, Winnie was already in full grandmother-type holiday gear: long swishy skirt, a fine dusting of makeup. Avery wondered if he should mention that he did plan to change out of his flip-flops and cut-off khakis.

“I’m good. I mean, yeah, you can if you want.” She took a seat across from him at the little round table and just watched. She had already stopped by several times this morning, and once or twice Avery caught her peering at the ovens. (He suspected she was checking that at least one of them did hold, in fact, a turkey.) He was snapping the ends off haricots verts, with a bucket of them on the floor between his feet—three pounds down, three to go.

“How on earth do you do that so fast? Your hands are a blur.”

“Try one,” Avery said, nodding at the bowl on the table. Winnie carefully bit the tip off a bean. “Awesome, right? They’re much better like this, before they get cooked.”

“But…you are going to cook these, right? Boil them, or something?”

“Boil? Wait, what’s that again?” Avery put on a blank face. He couldn’t help teasing Winnie; he knew she wouldn’t mind. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. They’ll be gray and mushy, just the way you like them.”

Winnie swatted his wrist with the bean. Then she winced. “What did you do to yourself?”

Yeah, that burn on his thumb was getting uglier by the day; it had finally stopped peeling, which was nice, but now it had turned a weird orange color. When he’d still had the dressing on it last week, Avery had woken up one morning to find that Nona had drawn a sad face on the thumb bandage and written next to that, in ballpoint letters so tiny he could barely read them, get well soon because you belong inside me.

“I can put on a glove, if you want.”

“And all these cuts! My lord, what do they have you doing at that bistro?”

“Actually, I’ve got a new thing now. Craft services. You know what that is?”

“Movie stars!” Winnie exclaimed. “You feed them? On the set? Have you met anyone—what about Al Pacino? I love him. He looks like he might enjoy a hearty meal.”

Avery snorted. “Yeah, nothing that exciting. Right now, it’s one of those Law and Order shows—”

“CSI? Special Victims Unit?” Winnie said immediately. “Not the Miami one. Is it with that brunette, or the two men?”

“Jesus,” Avery said. “I have no idea. I just make the omelets. Anyway,” he said, shaking the bowl of beans, “the food sucks, but there’s this guy, he’s helping me with some stuff for my place.”

“Oh?” Winnie brightened. “Then the city permits all got signed?”

“Well…that’s still kind of unresolved.” Avery really didn’t feel like going into details. It was hard not to get dragged down by everything that was going wrong with the Blue Apple. Avery remembered the actual shudder that ran through the building inspector’s face when he saw the nest of leaky, rotten pipes under the boiler-room floor. “Nah, it’s boring, you don’t want to hear about it. But anyway, this guy, he’s got all these connections with suppliers and he’s going to hook me up. Last week I went up to the fish market with him—oh man, you should have seen this crazy shit that goes on behind the scenes.”

“I’ll pass,” Winnie said.

“I took a bite out of a live dorado. It was flipping around in my hands, and I ate part of its underbelly.”

“Are you trying to shock me, Avery? It might take more than you’d think.”

He stopped snapping beans and wiped his hands. No time like the present. “Actually, if you’ve got a second…is Grandad around?”

“He’s resting. What’s the matter?”

“Well, I just—” He’d wanted to say this in some kind of a carefully thought out way, but with the way Winnie’s face looked right now, tight and closed as if she were bracing for impact, he just spilled ahead. “My mom doesn’t know I’m here. She doesn’t want me to come over anymore. Because of all the…you know.”

Winnie sat back. “So she told you.”

He stood, antsy. He needed to move around—he needed to whisk something. The beans wouldn’t need their vinaigrette for another few hours, but he took out a small saucepan, anyway, and set it with a lovely clink on one of the polished stainless-steel burners.

The phone rang, but after a glance at the caller ID, Winnie ignored it.

“You want me to answer?” he said. He knew these repeated calls from the tree-rights people were driving her crazy. Didn’t they have anything better to do than hassle some old lady? Calls, letters, the works—all for somebody wanting a pool on their lawn in this tiny town. “I’ll tell them off, if you want.”

“Don’t bother,” Winnie said. “I’m sure they’d love the attention.”

After a minute, the ringing stopped. Avery poured some olive oil and dropped in a chunk of double-cream butter.

“I hate that you’re in the middle of this,” he heard Winnie say slowly. “I can’t stand what it’s doing to your family.”

“One sec,” he said, thinking, rolling mental tastes through his head. Onion? No, something sweeter. Celery? No—he was chasing a fuller feeling in the mouth, with a fizzy bite that came much later. Then he got it: shallot, with dill. With one eye on the melting lump of butter, he got to work mincing.

“I keep thinking I should call your mother.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t do that,” Avery said. Two days ago, he had absently answered his phone while picking out sweet potatoes at Fairway on upper Broadway. Annette. Skipping the perfunctory how-are-you opening, his mother cut to why she’d called, explaining the basics of her legal drama with Jerry and why she was right on this—Avery focused on the yams, sorting and squeezing them—and why he should stop going out to Hartfield, until everything was sorted out.

“So, you’re off the hook now,” Annette said, and let out a big exhale. “You’re welcome.”

“Okay,” Avery said. He put a potato into his cart, and then took it out.

“I’m serious,” his mother said. “You’re done out there. Finito. Listen, what do you think about Thanksgiving on the beach? We were just looking at some last-minute flights to the islands, and—”

“This is all between you and Grandad. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“The lawyers say that any contact could escalate—”

“He’s pretty happy out here, Mom. You should see him and Winnie, they—”

“This isn’t about her! Don’t say her name to me! You don’t know one thing about it, what that woman has done. Buying that place. Taking over his whole—He—they—this is for his own good and I’m the only one who—”

Avery held the phone away from his head until Annette’s sputtering died down.

“—hear me? I said, you cannot see those people anymore.”

“Yeah,” Avery said. He gripped a sweet potato so hard that his fingernails broke through its surface. “Yeah, I heard you. The whole supermarket heard you. God—‘go see Grandad, stay away from Grandad.’ What am I, some little puppet? This is my life out here. I’m clean and I have a job and I’m sick of being told what to do!” Other shoppers edged away from him, but Avery didn’t care. He had flung the phone hard into the metal shopping cart and picked up another two yams.

In Winnie’s kitchen now, as soon as the butter sank into a golden puddle, he drizzled exactly two circles of honey into the pan. “I think she’s out of town, anyway.”

“But doesn’t it bother you? What she’s doing? That she’s suing her own father, that she’s telling all these people that he’s senile, that he stole money from her? Or maybe you could talk to her. You could tell her how much it means to him, all those times you’ve come out to visit. I’m just so scared of what this will do to him! He barely speaks about her anymore—he—oh, how can a daughter be such a monster?”

He glanced back over his shoulder at Winnie. She tossed the green bean onto the table and put her hand up to her head. “I shouldn’t have said that, Avery. You don’t have to say anything.”

Well, this sucked. Please don’t cry, Avery wished desperately. Was he supposed to hug her if she started crying? Nona. Think Nona. Nona would be here soon, eating his food, her hand on his leg under the table, making everything real again. He just had to get to that. “Don’t worry about it.” He scraped the whisk around the pan until it blurred, emulsifying the butter and making a tiny tornado funnel in the brown-gold liquid, just the size of his pinkie finger. Though he didn’t want it to, this particular action would maybe forever send Avery back into the kind of sense-memory he’d really rather not experience right there in his grandfather’s kitchen in Hartfield, New York: heating up his shot, stirring quickly while others waited their turn, the sick-sweet smell of the methane burner. At this place in Bucktown where he used to score, Avery remembered, what they used was a blackened metal cup—a regular kitchen measuring cup, like the ones he had stacked up right now on the counter next to the stove.

“I want to ask you something,” Winnie was saying, in a wavery, determined voice. “I know it’s not going to sound very gracious, but I have to ask anyway. Forgive me.”

“Yes, I’ll make sure you get seconds on dark meat,” Avery said. He turned, hoping. “There’s always a knockdown over the dark meat.”

But this time, it didn’t work. Without smiling at all, Winnie looked up at him, full in the face. “Why are you here? You’ve been a good boy to that man, Avery. Your letting him talk to you about the old days—that has been a good, good deed that you’ve done. But I know you didn’t want to spend all those Sunday afternoons out here. Why did you keep it up? Why did you come today, after what your mother told you?”

“What do you mean? I never said I didn’t—”

Winnie swiped her hand in front of her face, as if waving off a swarm of insects. “It’s just me now. You can be honest. I won’t say anything to him.”

Avery stood uncertainly in the space between the oven and the table. “Are you saying I’m out here just because of the money?”

“Are you?”

They faced each other. Outside, a thin snow was just starting to blow, hesitant, every which way. The phone rang again, but neither he nor Winnie moved. Avery got the sense that neither of them knew where to go from here. Did she want to know about the drugs, that he was off them? What kind of reassurance was he supposed to plug in now? And how many times, he thought angrily, how many fucking times would he need to tell that story—there was nothing new or original about it, but he had to carry it around, still—flogging himself in the same old ways so that he could get another pass.

“A restaurant takes everything,” Winnie said, pointing at the pot of now-cooling vinaigrette sauce. She hadn’t dropped her eyes from his. “Everything. You know what I read once?”

Avery shook his head no, he didn’t know, and then nodded yes, go on.

“Something like fifty-four percent of new restaurants, across the country, go under within the first two years.”

“I know—”

“It was over seventy percent for New York City restaurants. New ones. Over seventy percent fail, in the two years after opening.”

“Those ones didn’t have my poulet grand-mère. Or my salt cod mousse.”

“Avery,” Winnie said. She was shaking her head, and for the first time he could hear something tired in her voice that sounded like Rich used to, when he wanted to—what?—bring Avery down to earth.

“I have to go pick up my girlfriend,” he said, and the very words kicked him into action—he poured the vinaigrette into a glass jar and started to soap up the pot and a few others left over in the sink.

“The train won’t get in until twelve forty,” Winnie said. “Holiday schedule.”

Avery nodded, his back to her.

“We’re looking forward to meeting her,” Winnie said, but still, he didn’t turn around. “How do you pronounce it again? Such an unusual name.”

There was a gleaming, enormous dishwasher just to his left, but Avery ignored it, trusting his own precision work more than some machine. If anything, he’d use it for some extra drying racks.

“Avery, all I meant was—”

“What?” He said, and it came out shorter and harsher than he had planned. “Yeah, the odds generally suck, when you try to do something new. Thanks, though. That helps a lot. Knowing the specifics.” The water was stinging hot, and he wasn’t wearing rubber gloves, but Avery’s hands had become so numb to heat or pain that he barely registered. “I thought you were—” But he just shook his head, embarrassed at how suddenly disappointed he felt. “It’s not like Grandad doesn’t know the risks, by the way. I didn’t ask him for that investment money, either. He offered it—it was his idea.”

“I know that!” Winnie exclaimed.

“And it wasn’t as much as you probably think,” Avery said. “I had these old bonds from my other grandparents, from when I was a kid, and I cashed them all in…whatever.” He flicked the hand towel across the faucets, and then snapped it into an exact half fold to be hung over the lip of the sink. He was getting heat from her? After all the time he’d put in here, after all the hours he’d listened and nodded and said sure, an Olympic swimming pool was just what this run-down place needed. Did she have any idea what everyone really thought about that? Hell, what Avery sometimes thought, about a person who wants to axe the biggest tree on the block so that a couple old people could splash around before their afternoon naps.

What did she want him to say? Something half true or almost true but still completely corny, like the fact that the old man was growing on him? That spending time with Grandad would always remind Avery of not having a father, but then instantly ease that sharp pain? Or that the great gift of his life so far had turned out to be a woman who made him want to be more?

Where did he put the keys? God. Okay, there.

“You’re misunderstanding me,” Winnie said urgently. “I don’t care how much money he’s giving you—you know I don’t care at all about that, not at all. I just wanted to know that you’ll come back.”

“Of course I’m coming back,” Avery said gently, nodding at the oven and stove. “Don’t burn the place down,” he said lightly but without looking at her.

“All right,” Winnie said, just as the phone started ringing again. He went past her quickly, so quickly that he couldn’t be sure if the older woman had raised her arm to stop him or just put her hand out to him. He thought maybe she had, but he didn’t really know and by the time he was even realizing it, Avery was out in the wispy snow air, a trace of chimney smoke there and gone, hurrying toward the strange car he had borrowed for the day.

He was twenty minutes early for the train, so he sat, fiddling with the dial on the useless radio for a while. And then he shut it off and just sat. A few other cars pulled into the tiny lot and idled nearby, puffing exhaust clouds that drifted up and then faded.

Two nights ago, Nona’s loud, upset voice had awakened him some time before dawn. Avery slept so regularly over at her place now that his clothes and things were pretty evenly divided between his apartment and hers. He’d come up on one elbow, eyes barely open, confused to find himself alone in bed. The flooding light from the main room poured into Nona’s tiny bedroom cave, where the door was ajar. Avery, who was working until 2 or 3 am six nights a week, slept in a thick, unmoving haze—he always had. But sleep was different for Nona, he now knew. She thrashed, she twisted, she shoved him around the mattress. It was common for her to get up several times a night, often to work—he’d gotten used to the sleep-dazed sight of her naked back, bluish in the light of the computer screen, curved away from him as she sat on the edge of the bed, headphones on, obsessively looping and splicing pieces of her own voice.

That radio was still on, upstairs. He could hear the fuzz and blare through the ceiling, as if someone had left the tuner halfway between two stations—one of them Spanish talk radio—and then turned it up, full blast. Nona must be going crazy, he thought. She’d already been up there to bang on the door—no one answered—and she had been pacing and agitated in the hour or two before Avery could convince her to come to bed. He’d dropped right off to sleep, of course.

“If you could just go up there,” she was saying from the other room. “Yes. Fine. I’ll file whatever you want me to!”

Avery pushed open the door a little more. Nona was sitting on a rickety wood chair in the kitchen area, bent over so that her head was almost between her knees. She held the phone to an ear, and had her other hand buried in her hair, gripping the back of her head.

She looked so little and unprotected, her bare limbs out in the chilly air. And something about the way she was slumped over, caught in the harsh overhead light—Nona didn’t just look tired, she looked old. It scared him.

“Listen,” she was saying. “It’s not just me, all right? My husband works nights. You know? He just got back and he needs to sleep and this goddamn radio is keeping us all up.”

Avery, in the car at the Hartfield train station, was seared again by the pleasure of those words—my husband—and instantly mortified by how he kept playing them back to himself, the way they’d sounded in Nona’s voice. Of course, she’d only said that to try to win a little extra sympathy from whatever unimpressed police officer had happened to be working the phones at 4 am. He’d known that in the minute he’d heard her say it, and he knew it now. But he couldn’t stop remembering it, either, this stupid throwaway phrase that didn’t mean a thing.

Didn’t mean a thing to her, that is. Avery watched the train rumble in, the doors slide open. He understood it then, full force, that he loved Nona more than she loved him.

So it took him a moment, still absorbing such a realization and turning it over in his head (it didn’t feel bad, exactly, this imbalance—didn’t someone have to love someone more?), to realize that Nona wasn’t alone, there on the platform. And also that it wasn’t a coincidence—as dopey Avery first imagined it had to be—that Thomas had taken the same train out to the same suburb, on Thanksgiving afternoon.

Thomas stood and squinted around the platform. Thomas flipped sunglasses down, from his balding forehead. Thomas slowly followed Nona to where Avery was standing by the open car door, thunderstruck and not trying to hide it.

“Hey, you!” She called out in a fake, upbeat, non-Nona way. That was for Thomas’s benefit, Avery understood. Then she was hugging him hard, whispering, “He got in early this morning. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and I tried to call, but did you turn your phone off? I just thought—”

Thomas reached them and stuck out a hand to Avery, which Avery reluctantly shook. “Everyone hates a party crasher,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind, man.”

“Of course we don’t mind,” Nona said, and that we went a long way toward making it all right, Avery thought, as did her outfit. Far from her usual getups, this was a positively sedate costume for Nona—not only had she wound all her dreadlocks into some kind of single, thick braid that hung down her back, but her plain wool skirt was a size too big, and her dark gray sweater a size too small. Only her shoes, flat and black but scuffed like crazy, with wild pointed toes, could give her away. He knew he was staring, at her clothes and at her gorgeous, un-madeup face, but for a moment Avery just couldn’t even move, because he was so taken in by what the effort implied.

“Well, I wanted fucking flowers,” she was saying, pushing something into his hands. “I went to the place, but all they had were these limp, pitiful excuses for what was once plant life, and then we had to race for the train, so…”

“Juice,” Avery said, turning the lukewarm glass bottle around.

“It’s this passion-fruit kind from Oaxaca,” Nona said. “You can ditch it, or whatever. The bodega guy swore to me that anyone would love it. I mean, it was either juice or some mass-market crap from Grand Central.”

“It’s perfect,” Avery said, tucking the bottle carefully back in its brown paper bag. He put his hand on the soft part of her throat and slipped a few fingers under the collar of her sweater. He went around to open the door for her. Thomas got his bald self into the backseat, and when Avery was putting it in drive, a hand stuck a bottle of red wine in his face.

“Small barrel producer from the Loire Valley,” Thomas said. “1997, which was a decent year, of course. Lot of rain. In my opinion, they could have aged it one more year, to soften the tannins and make that flabby pinot pop just a bit more, but what do I know? It’s serviceable, at best.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Avery said. Dick. He stuck the bottle on the car floor by his feet, where he could feel it rolling around with a couple of empty, crumpled soda cups. He swung the car out of the parking lot and sped across Main to take the back way, along the road behind the school, to Greenham. The engine surged, and Avery didn’t really try to rein in this outward sign of his anger. They climbed the long hill lined with huge oaks and sycamores, past houses that were set farther and farther back from the road.

When they pulled into his grandfather’s long driveway, Thomas made a sound, pretending to be shocked. And maybe he was. It had been a while since Avery had really seen what this place looked like—at least on the outside: its sheer size for one thing, its mass of heavy stone walls and handful of pointed roofs, the way it spread out in all directions, with paved little patios all over, each bordered by high, dark hedges. He’d forgotten that the front door looked like something out of a Monty Python medieval spoof, twice as tall as any of them, made of dark wood beams and metal bolts the size of a man’s fist. And the lawn—even covered in branches and uneven, wet piles of leaves, it looked like Notre Dame’s practice field.

“Oh, my God,” Thomas said. “Should we go in through the back? Servants’ entrance?”

“Shut it,” Nona said sweetly. She put her hand on Avery’s leg. “I’m starving.”

Thomas got out of the car and just stood there, making a show of gaping at the house. “There won’t be enough crème brûlées,” Avery said, low, to Nona.

“He’ll share mine,” she said, and opened her door.

“Don’t worry about the bird, Chef,” Thomas called to Avery. “I’ll just eat some of the sides.”

“He’s vegetarian,” Nona said. She was twisting her skirt around, trying to right it.

“Everything has duck fat in it,” Avery said, following them, holding tight to the bottle of passion-fruit juice. He’d wanted her to meet Grandad, but now everything about this plan was crumbling. What did Nona think, about this house, about Hartfield? She had to know this wasn’t him, right? Because Avery was totally separate, totally different, from everything that was here: it was just Thanksgiving, after all. “He can have toast.”