Commuters (15 page)

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.”