“Okay, I get it,” Avery said, as the cab turned south off Court Street onto yet another quiet, picturesque street lined with old trees. “Poncy Brooklyn. A little tour of poncy Brooklyn, to get you primed for la dolce vita.” Jokes helped. Sometimes.

Nona said nothing, just directed the driver along Henry Street to the corner, and then told him to stop. It was almost 10 pm, but there were still plenty of couples strolling the wide, evenly paved sidewalks or sitting on their brownstone steps waving to passersby. Everyone was so white out here, Avery thought with disgust, glaring at anyone who dared glance at him unfolding himself out of the cab. Look at all these happy, clueless, white losers. Even this dumb neighborhood name—Cobble Hill—made him want to vomit. Then again, it could just be his mood. Everything that he cared about would be gone in less than three days, and it turned out that was sort of affecting his perspective.

“Well?” Nona posed herself against the chipped green pole of the street sign. Even though the night was springtime warm, she wore a long, raggedy sweater and black tights, and a pair of high-top basketball sneakers.

“Strong Place,” Avery read, above her. “Yeah, so?”

She dropped her arms. “Forget it.”

“What? It’s a cute name? Is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. I wanted you to appreciate the cuteness.” She linked her arm in his, all too easily. Most of his stupid sarcasm these past few days failed to anger her the way it would have before.

“Just one block long,” she said, pointing.

“The whole street?” Avery snorted. “Should’ve been called Short Place.”

Nona was checking an address she’d inked on the palm of one hand. “That one,” she said.

The crumbling stairs they were climbing led to the same kind of reddish brownstone building as all the rest. Nothing different about this one—Number 42—that he could see. No restaurant sign. But Nona had dragged him to so many venues by this point that Avery figured this was just another off-the-beaten-track spot, somewhere only those in the know could find. Or that’s what he would have assumed, except this block out here in yuppie Brooklyn was eons away from the places they usually went to, in DUMBO or other parts of Williamsburg, or even the Blue Apple’s deserted stretch in north Fort Greene. Nona had insisted, though—she was going to take him out to eat, for once, and so tonight was her pick, her treat. Avery had tried to seem psyched about the sweetness of this plan, the way he knew she wanted him to, but it was hard. He wasn’t even hungry.

It took several buzzers, but finally Nona pressed the right one. A young guy came to the glass-fronted door, wiping his hands on a towel. He let them in and kissed Nona on the cheek, put a hand on Avery’s shoulder and ushered them into the first-floor apartment, pointing out the two kids’ bikes in the hall that they should avoid tripping over. Inside, there were two high-ceilinged rooms separated by painted-over pocket doors, and four tiny tables spread out as far as possible across the uneven wood floors—someone’s apartment minus the bed and couches. Couples were at the tables, two younger and one older. Huh, Avery thought. So it was a dinner party, of sorts. He was bummed; small talk with strangers was not high on his list at the moment.

The guy—the host?—led them to the empty table, and apologized for the paperback book that was propping up its one wobbly leg. They sat, he left, and Avery braced himself for weirdness; soon there would be performance art, some kind of yelling and/or nudity, he was sure of it. There was a coffee can full of pencils on the tablecloth and a stack of papers underneath it: proof. Of something.

“What’s this music playing?” Avery asked, suspicious.

Nona listened for a moment. “Schubert,” she said. “Second piano trio. Um…third movement.”

“Are you going to sing?”

“You never know.”

The guy came back to the table—Wendell, his name was—and engaged Nona in a long discussion about a mutual friend. Avery dismissed him as boring (blue button-down, hair parted on the side, big doofy smile) and gazed instead at the older couple at the table next to them. They were forties, or fifty maybe. All dressed up, both kind of fat, and not talking much. Avery wondered why they were already eating. Were he and Nona late to the party? There was a meaty sauce clinging nicely to the man’s pappardelle noodles. Avery felt a flicker of interest in sorting out its components—not beef, maybe veal?—which then died out.

“Just water,” Nona said, flicking her eyes to Avery, when Wendell was going on about Bordeaux and merlot.

After he left, Avery said, “You never finished Choke, did you?” It came out more accusatory than he’d planned, but then again, so what?

“I’m not done,” Nona said. “I don’t read as fast as you do.”

“You hated the other Palahniuk novel too.”

Nona took a pencil from the coffee cup and started to write, fast, on one of the slips of paper. He tried to read upside down, but she covered it with her hand, like he was cheating on an exam.

“Take a look, why don’t you,” Wendell said. “But you’re the last seating, so no rush.” He dropped the edge of a chalkboard onto their tabletop and held it so they could see. Avery stared at it blankly: Fiddlehead and goat cheese salad, $9. Pappardelle with veal ragout, $17. Grilled grain-fed spring lamb, MP.

“MP?” Nona asked.

“Market price,” Wendell said. “Let me see what we have left, and I’ll let you know.” He stood the chalkboard against the wall and hurried away.

Okay, so now Avery got it. A pretend restaurant. A performed “dinner party” as “restaurant” as critique of foodie capitalism…something along those lines. He’d done this type of thing before with Nona. Audience-participation art. (One had involved a playground at midnight, with adults dressed in overalls and Underoos, swinging and sliding, digging in sand, dead serious. The animal crackers and juice, though, had been a nice touch.) Well, he would play along, if that’s what she wanted.

“What are you going to order?” Avery said, leaning back in his chair, grinning.

Nona was studying the menu. “This place is kind of pricier than I thought. Maybe the pasta?”

“Right. Pricier.” He snorted. “Did you bring your Monopoly money?”

She ignored this, though, digging around in her shapeless purse.

Wendell came back. “Sorry. No more lamb. But I can seriously recommend the pappardelle. And we’ve got just enough for two. Nobody has a veal problem, do they?”

“No veal problem here,” Nona said, smiling up at him. “That sounds perfect.”

Avery shrugged—why not? “And a goat cheese salad, to start? We’ll share it.” Wendell nodded, obviously pleased. Why wasn’t he writing this all down on a fake order pad, though? And he shouldn’t be wearing that excited, nervous smile. People doing these pieces were usually real serious, so you got that it was art.

“Did you read this much as a boy?” Nona was looking straight at him, without guile or agenda. She wasn’t trying to change the subject. She wanted to know him. But what did it matter, now? “I always pictured you as a hell-raiser, not some studious little bookworm.”

“You can’t be both?”

“Can you? Were you?”

Avery toyed with his fork and knife (mismatched silver patterns). He pictured that scared, angry boy he’d been, with messy blond hair and chewed, bloody cuticles, trapped in his room, listening to his mother shout at someone on the phone down the hall. That boy could flip his desk over, again. Or he could get lost in Middle-earth, somewhere between Rivendell and Gondor. What’ll it be?

“The first two days I was in rehab,” he said, picking his way through the phrasing. How hateful to have to say it out loud, how dull and meaningless. “On the third floor, where you go when you’re coming off the shit, when they still think you might go mental on an aide. They take away all your stuff, and you have to wear these matching pajamas—they look like doctors’ scrubs.”

The salad arrived, already divided on two plates by Wendell, who put them down gently and then departed.

Nona didn’t touch hers. “Go on.”

“Well, long story short, it’s basically lockdown. The guards call it that, to each other. They’re not supposed to say it to you, though. But it doesn’t take a genius.”

“I would have been terrified. Anyone would.”

“I couldn’t tell if it was the junk, leaking out of my system, after fucking it up for so long. Or the idea of it, that I couldn’t leave. That all the furniture was bolted down, the windows…yeah. I was so scared. I was scared of being that scared—I had to fight my panic all the time, count squares on the floor, that kind of thing.” He let out a deep breath. This wasn’t what he’d meant to talk about—he wanted to answer her, about reading. “You going to try that?”

“Finish telling me first.”

Avery took a bite of greens—peppery, warm, expertly dressed. Huh. Not bad, for pretend salad.

“The TV room was too depressing, they had it on all the time, the plastic couches, the volume up full bore. So I found where they had some paperbacks on a shelf. Six or seven, all crap. Except there was this copy of Rebecca, you know that novel? Kind of a romance-thriller thing. I think they made a movie—”

“You have that novel! I’ve seen it on your shelf. So that’s where you got it, rehab?”

“Oh,” Avery said, rattled, deeply embarrassed. “No, I bought that copy. Later.” He had to have one around, all the time, since then.

But even as Nona waited, an expectant smile on her face, he lost the thread. Energy rushed out of him, and with it any urge to tell this story. The silence grew; Avery dropped his eyes to his unfinished plate, which was soon replaced with a dish of pasta.

Why? Why should he tell this to her, when she was as good as gone, when all of it was over? His few attempts at protesting—they could make it work, long-distance, and he would visit—had been met with such hesitancy that Avery had instantly backed off, his pride hurt. Look, if he was going to spill his soul and guts and then she would leave anyway and nothing would be different, wasn’t it better to just shut the hell up? They would “keep in touch,” she might have e-mail (she might not), and there was a chance she could come back once over the summer—fine, but he wasn’t dumb enough to think that meant anything. The time for telling each other heartwarming stories about each other’s pasts was over. What good could it do now?

On the third floor that day, standing next to him at the pathetic bookshelf, there had been a woman named Gris. Fellow inmate, total stranger, a heavy Mexican woman who argued and pleaded for him to give her Rebecca, said she was sick to death of her romance magazines and needed to put her eyes on something other than those godforsaken soap operas. Or herself, in the bathroom mirror. Who should get it first, this stupid paperback? Should they tear it in half? Let the guards mediate? (Hell no, both agreed). So they had ended up together, he and sweaty Gris, for several hours, pressed side to side and leg to leg in their matching scrubs, the book held between them; he was faster, so he read ahead, on the right side—she slowly turned pages on the left, sucking her teeth with interest and occasionally interrupting Avery with a question about the plot or a word’s definition. Both of them had to hold their heads tilted uncomfortably to one side; both had to endure snickers from the aides and catcalls from the other junkies. Didn’t matter. Avery couldn’t speak for Gris, but he found there—in stupid, doomed Manderley, in the effort of turning one page at a time, in Gris’s solid flesh—the first glimmerings of calm, an easing of his panic, since they had stuck him in that place twenty hours before. He had been using fast and ugly for weeks by then; it had been a long time since he’d read anything.

He shook his head at Nona’s gesture—and then?

He could smell Gris right now. She had been unwashed; she reeked of exhaustion and body odor and the metallic tinge of meth. Strangely, that hadn’t bothered him—the opposite, actually; her physical presence had grounded him. But he wasn’t going to tell Nona about that, not now, not ever. Or that he’d never seen Gris after that, after he’d finished Rebecca and ceded the book to her. She had taken it into both hands without even looking at him—she wasn’t yet at the halfway mark—and then early the next day they moved him down to the second floor. He had improved.

“Don’t put cheese on that,” he instructed Nona, aiming in his tone for good humor, for it doesn’t matter. “Not every pasta sauce needs Parmesan, but everyone always dumps it on it, anyway. And keep that in mind in Italy. Seriously. They’d laugh at the way Americans put cheese on everything.”

“You don’t have to do this. Make jokes about it, be cheerful.”

“No, I’m just saying.” Avery took another bite of pappardelle; somewhere along the line, he had joined in the pretense, or he had forgotten the need to—this dinner was good, fake restaurant or not. And he was feeling better, from withholding that story. Not because it was a fuck-you gesture (although, tell the truth, it sort of was), but because a tiny spark had kindled in him: he would need to build up his reserves, to survive Nona’s leaving. He would keep things to himself again. He always had, before her, and now he saw why.

“Another thing,” he said, mouth full, back in the comfort of lecturing her about food. “It’s not going to be like this—” He gestured with his fork at their big plates. “They do pasta as a first course, not the main. Definitely order it, but you have to save room. The meat course comes next. Are you listening? This is important!”

Nona was watching him carefully. “Meat course,” she said.

“I will not be held responsible if you go to live in food heaven and miss out on the whole experience. All right? Don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

“I won’t.” She was eating now too, very slowly. After a while, at Wendell’s suggestion, they shared a mocha pot de crème.

The couple at the table next to them, the older one, had finished their meal some time ago. Avery tuned out while Nona talked to them.

“He has one, I’m sure. Hello?” Nona tapped his wrist with her spoon. The apartment was quieter now, without Wendell rushing from table to table—Avery heard the rustle and clank of dishes in running water, coming from the back.

“Has what?”

The woman at the table was staring at him expectantly. “Train schedule?” she said. “The New Haven line? He thinks we’ll make it, but I don’t know.” Her husband appeared, coats slung over an arm.

Avery thumbed through his wallet and handed her a creased and crumpled paper, with its times printed in blurry red ink. Frankly, he was a little annoyed that he even had this thing. He was riding the train so often these days, to and from Hartfield, that he might as well start buying one of the monthly commuter fares. (A whisper of reality: if Grandad even had another month.) The guy at the ticket window was starting to say hi and automatically ring him up. It especially bugged him when Winnie took him to the station right at the reverse rush hour, 5 or 6 pm. He hated to see all those suits disembarking from the trains, with the same briefcases and the same tired smiles for whoever was dutifully waiting in the crowded parking lot. All of it made Avery want to shout, Wake up, people! There was so much more than this shuttling back and forth: job/home, job/home. There had to be.

But he couldn’t deny the pleasures of regular action, he who could clean and chop vegetables for hours in a haze of physical contentment. And though he tried not to, Avery couldn’t help warming to that first sight of Winnie when the train pulled into Hartfield’s dinky little station. He liked when her eyes found him, the way it felt to be expected.

The couple at the next table pored over the train schedule, laughing. Big night for the suburban folks, out for a hit of lame performance art in poncy Brooklyn. Avery lost interest and turned back to his dessert. Wendell came by with a brown plastic folder, with their bill. Their “bill.” Nona, who had cash ready, handed it to Wendell, who smoothly tucked it away without counting. Avery silently took back his schedule from the couple, who thanked him and hurried out to find a cab. Nona and Wendell began to make complicated plans to get together for coffee before she left, and Avery looked down. In his hands, a miniature map, where different-colored train lines snaked up and away from Grand Central, pinned down at intervals by dozens of black dots and town names. If he searched closely, Avery knew, he could find Hartfield among them.

Grandad wasn’t speaking anymore. Winnie was pretending that she didn’t remember how long it had been since he said something—“he’ll be so excited!” she said, snatching the photographs out of Avery’s hands, those few he had found of himself and his grandfather, scouring the only boxes of junk he had from home. Winnie lingered for one extra moment, on the one that had his mom (in wool hat and sunglasses) standing next to Grandad, one of her hands gripping the collar of a scowling, snow-covered Avery. But she said nothing, only handed the small stack back to him. “He’ll be so excited,” she repeated.

But Grandad wasn’t awake—he wasn’t asleep, either, just somewhere in between. Somewhere out of Avery’s reach. He tried for a while, like he figured he should, holding up a photo and talking brightly about whatever Christmas it had been, or trip to the dunes, his own disastrous bowl-shaped haircuts (bad, bad, very bad). But Grandad’s eyes were unfocused, and his mouth gapped open wetly, which Avery hated and tried not to look at. He focused instead on the prickly white hairs of his grandfather’s whiskers, almost curling now, longer than the brush-cut on his head. Avery tossed the photographs aside. Screw old pictures—this man needed a shave.

So, without asking Winnie—without thinking to—he found a razor in the bathroom (electric, thank God) and went to work. This involved bracing himself, one knee up on the bed next to Grandad, and a hand on the side of his cool, dry face. The cheeks were no problem, of course, and the chin, while not exactly easy, was handled by Avery turning himself around and pressing close to his grandfather’s face, so that he could make those downward strokes just as he did on himself. When it came to the mustache, and the tricky area around his lips (which were parted and loose), Avery found himself cooing some kind of weird reassuring song, half comfort, half curses, as he navigated the folds of skin that hung there. It wasn’t until he was finished, still kneeling on the bed, that he saw Winnie in the doorway. Avery froze—what was the look on her face? He still had his shoes on—did he get mud on the bedspread, or something? He nervously put the razor on the bedside table and followed her into the hall, and downstairs to the kitchen, where it looked liked she was camping out—it was the only lit room amid the dark, cold rest of the house.

“I didn’t think to do that for him,” she said, her back still to Avery. “I suppose the nurses have been shaving him when they do his bathing, but maybe someone forgot, this week.”

“No big deal,” Avery said, uneasy. “It’s a guy thing. What’s all this?”

Winnie laughed once, flat and mirthless. She saw what he was looking at—the piles and piles of insurance paperwork covering the small table, the two phones, two pairs of eyeglasses, a calculator, and a million yellow sticky notes. “My homework,” she said. “This is what I get for opting out of math as a girl.”

Avery craned his head, but the first column of numbers, so shockingly high, made him rear back. “Whoa. Do you need—I mean, want some help with all this?”

Winnie waved that off. Neither of them, he noticed, ever spoke about Jerry’s will or whatever craziness he’d done to it before he got sick. It was as if all that had never happened, and maybe it hadn’t, Avery realized. Maybe everyone—his mom, Winnie, Rachel—had just forgotten all about that, in the chaos of Jerry doing…whatever he was doing. (Dying. Was he?)

“Did you deposit the checks?”

“Uh—not yet. Sorry.”

“But I thought you were opening this month or next! Didn’t you tell him that?”

Well, last week he had told Jerry something along those lines, glossing over all the continuing Blue Apple screwups and the problems with vendors and the fact that Nona’s leaving had thrown him into an utter tailspin so that he could barely bring himself to go to the restaurant, which was more or less rehabbed and ready to go. But he said a lot of things to Jerry, rambling on and on. You had to, when you were sitting next to someone blanked out in a vegetative state. Didn’t she get that?

“What are you waiting for?” Winnie said, pressing it. “You know this is what he wants.” Not what he would have wanted.

“Have you talked to my mom?” This had its desired effect. Winnie immediately began fussing with a series of pill bottles, arranging them in height order, shortest to tallest. Avery noticed there was no food in sight.

“We’re exchanging messages. And I speak to your stepfather, occasionally. I invite them to come and stay here whenever they want. I do, nearly every time!”

“She’s probably not up for that, I’m guessing,” Avery said. Winnie shrugged. “She called me,” he went on. “She wants me to—”

But Avery couldn’t say it. He rubbed his right thumb, red and abraded where he must have buzzed himself with Jerry’s razor. Talk sense into her, his mother had begged. He should die at home. I want him to come home. He’s so far away, out there, and I’m—I’m—then she had broken down.

“We should go, if you’re going to make the four twenty,” Winnie said. “Let me just tell the nurse.” She went into the darkened hallway, calling back, “There’s money for you on the table.” Avery, as usual, left the fifteen dollars untouched. It was either sad or funny, the way she still kept trying to pay for his train tickets.

In sleepy Cobble Hill, it was past midnight. Avery stood and left Nona and Wendell, wandering back through the rest of the apartment. He had to see this kitchen—the “kitchen”—and went past empty tables, wiped clean. How was this all pulled off? What was the trick?

In the cramped galley kitchen, a tall, red-haired woman in black-and-white checked pants and a white jacket—splattered and stained—was squatting on her heels, loading a fridge with plastic containers. She looked up at him without much interest.

Avery scanned the scene, saw the small but well-chosen selection of pots and pans, the ancient range and oven, still giving off palpable heat, the hot-water attachment to the sink, the dishes drying in a rack. It was coming to him, even as the chef—for that was what she was—put a hand on her hip and gave him a can-I-help-you stare. “Did you cook…all that?” he said stupidly. “You cooked it. For real.”

“Well, I didn’t use a magic wand, that’s for sure.” The chef shut the fridge, gave a last wipe to the counter, and stuffed the rag into a garbage bag full of dirty linens. She had to nudge Avery aside to switch the lights off. His mind was whirling. This wasn’t a game, it wasn’t a performance at all, it was…

“What?” The chef laughed a little at his confusion, and pulled her hair out of its tight ponytail. “Did you think no license meant no sweat and tears?” She left, calling good-bye to Wendell. Avery followed her into the middle of the room, where Nona wasn’t.

Wendell came up to him, handing him a card. “We’ll be moving around for the next month or so. Things got a little dicey over the past week, so I’m scouting a better location. But just call anytime. You won’t need the password. Just remind me that you know Nona, okay?” Wendell clapped a hand on Avery’s shoulder and walked him to the door. “I usually get back to people in two days, with the time and location. Cool, man. Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks,” Avery said, still kind of dazed and now out in the hall. The card he held read Dinners only. Invitation only. (718) 555–1223

Wendell shut the door between them, calling “Don’t tell your friends!” with a chuckle that suggested this joke was an old and favorite one.

Outside, Nona was sitting on the stoop. Avery came up behind her and sat down, putting one leg on either side of her and his chin on top of her head.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said accusingly.

“Tell you what?”

“That wasn’t art.”

“It wasn’t?”

“I mean—that was real. One of those black-market places, right? I heard about those. I always wanted to check that out. But I didn’t think—”

“What?”

Avery said nothing. What he hadn’t thought was that you could do that kind of cooking, on the fly, off the books, no site or license, and have it all look so…normal. Normal like Wendell seemed normal, with his accountant hairstyle and friendly, regular-guy demeanor. He would have guessed anyone running that kind of operation—which was pretty ballsy, Avery thought—would be, well, more punk. But the chef looked like some woman with a job, like a tired mom…she looked a little like Winnie’s daughter Rachel.

Nona, who had a way of reading his mind, said, “Do you think they know your grandfather? And Winnie, and her family?”

“Who?”

“That couple trying to make the train.” She reached a hand back to smack him gently, for not listening, for not paying attention.

“They were from Hartfield?” Avery pulled his head up off her sweet-smelling hair.

Nona twisted around to eye him. Then she handed back a tiny piece of paper, crumpled into a ball, still warm from her fist. He unwrapped it and read what she had written with the pencil on the table:

• 1. I hate me, too.
• 2. Is there any way to not be unbeautiful about this?
• 3. Asshole, you’re welcome!!!

Avery pulled her face gently toward him and kissed her forehead, her left eye. He was an asshole. He kissed the side of her mouth, her cheek; he put his hands down her front and kissed her throat. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for dinner,” he whispered, kissing her ear softly, gently folding her ear forward so he could kiss the curve of the bone there. He fingered the dark blue tattoos that were speckled on her throat; he slid her sleeve up so he could follow them down her arm.

In front of them, late-night dog-walkers passed by in silence, and blue TV screens glowed in the first and second floors of the buildings across the way. The trees here were starting to bud, and their sweet smell hung in the night air. Avery kept kissing Nona. He would make love to her tonight, and he would not cry afterward. She was leaving; he loved her. He loved her, and she was leaving. At least for now, here on this stoop on Strong Place’s tiny block, it was possible to hold those two things in his mind, when usually they bucked and fought each other until he thought he would go crazy. He held her in front of him on the steps and thought about restaurants with no names and people from Hartfield who ate at them, and about Gris and where she might be tonight, and what book he might read next, all while tree branches moved overhead, and the headlights of cars rolled slowly around the street corner and disappeared.