Last Night In Twisted River

CHAPTER 7. BENEVENTO AND AVELLINO

THE BUILDING WAS OLD AND MUCH ABUSED BY ITS PROXIMITY to the Connecticut River. A few of the apartments had been abused, too, but not exclusively by the river; back in the sixties, a couple of Windham College kids had made a mess of one of them. Once cheap, the apartments were slightly more expensive now. The Connecticut had been cleaned up, and the town of Brattleboro was much improved by it. The cook’s second-floor apartment was in the back of the old Main Street building, overlooking the river. Most mornings, Dominic would go downstairs to his empty restaurant and the deserted kitchen to make himself some espresso; the kitchen was also in the back, with a good view of the river.

On the ground floor, there had always been a storefront or some kind of restaurant on the Main Street side of the weather-beaten apartment building, which was across the street from an army-navy clothing store and the local movie theater, known as the Latchis.

If you walked down the hill on Main Street, past the Latchis, you would come to Canal Street and the market where the cook did most of his shopping. From there, heading out of town, you could find your way to the hospital and a shopping mall-and, out by Interstate 91, a bunch of gas stations and the usual fast-food places.

If you walked north on Main Street, up the hill, you came to The Book Cellar-quite a good bookstore, where the now-famous author Danny Angel had done a reading or two, and his share of book signings. The cook had met a couple of his Vermont lady friends in The Book Cellar, where they all knew Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, as Mr. Angel-the celebrated novelist’s father, and the owner-chef of the best Italian restaurant around.

After Daniel chose that nom de plume, Dominic had had to rename himself, too.

“Shit, I suppose you should both be Angels-maybe that much is clear,” Ketchum had said. “Like father, like son-and all that goes with that.” But Ketchum had insisted that the cook lose the Dominic, too.

“How about Tony?” Danny had suggested to his dad. It was the Fourth of July, 1967, and Ketchum had nearly burned down the Putney farmhouse with his fireworks display; little Joe continued to scream for five minutes after the last cherry bomb went off.

The name Tony still sounded Italian but was nicely anonymous, Danny was thinking, while Dominic liked the name because of his fondness for Tony Molinari; only a few nights away from Boston, the cook already knew how much he was going to miss Molinari. Tony Angel, previously Dominic Del Popolo, previously Bacigalupo, would miss Paul Polcari, too-nor would the cook think any less of Paul when he heard about what happened in August of that same summer.

Tony Angel would blame Ketchum for the mishap of the cowboy getting out of Vicino di Napoli alive-not Paul Polcari. Poor Paul could never have squeezed the trigger. It was Ketchum’s fault, in the cook’s opinion, because Ketchum had told them all that it didn’t matter which one of them was back in the kitchen with the shotgun. Come on! For someone who knew guns as well as Ketchum did, he should have known that of course it mattered who was taking aim and would (or would not) pull the trigger! Tony Angel would never blame sweet, gentle Paul.

“You blame Ketchum too much, for everything,” Danny would tell his dad more than once, but that was just the way it was.

If Molinari had been back in the kitchen, Dominic Del Popolo would have changed his name back to Dominic Baciagalupo-and he would have gone back to Boston, to Carmella. The cook would never have had to become Tony Angel. And the writer Danny Angel, whose fourth novel was his first bestseller-now in 1983, his fifth novel had already been translated into more than thirty foreign languages-would have gone back to calling himself, as he dearly wanted to, Daniel Baciagalupo.

“Damn it, Ketchum!” the cook had said to his old friend. “If Carmella had been back in the kitchen with your blessed Ithaca, she would have shot Carl twice while he was still squinting at her. If the idiot busboy had been back there, I swear he would have pulled that trigger!”

“I’m sorry, Cookie. They were your friends-I didn’t know them. You should have told me there was a nonshooter-a fucking pacifist!-among them.”

“Stop blaming each other,” Danny would tell them repeatedly.

After all, it had been sixteen years-or it would be, this coming August-since Paul Polcari failed to pull the trigger of Ketchum’s single-shot 20-gauge. It had all worked out, hadn’t it? the cook was thinking, as he sipped his espresso and watched the Connecticut River run by his kitchen window.

They had once run logs down the Connecticut. In the dining room of the restaurant, which looked out upon Main Street and the marquee with the name of whatever movie was currently playing at the Latchis Theatre, the cook had framed a big black-and-white photograph of a logjam in Brattleboro. The photo had been taken years ago, of course; they weren’t moving logs over water in Vermont or New Hampshire anymore.

River driving had lasted longer in Maine, which was why Ketchum had worked so much in Maine in the sixties and seventies. But the last river drive in Maine was in 1976-from Moosehead Lake, down the Kennebec River. Naturally, Ketchum had been in the thick of it. He’d called the cook collect from some bar in Bath, Maine, not far from the mouth of the Kennebec.

“I’m trying to distract myself from some asshole shipyard worker, who is sorely tempting me to cause him a little bodily harm,” Ketchum began.

“Just remember you’re an out-of-stater, Ketchum. The local authorities will take the side of the shipyard worker.”

“Christ, Cookie-do you know what it costs to move logs over water? I mean getting them from where you cut them to the mill-about fifteen fucking cents a cord! That’s all a river drive will cost you.”

The cook had heard this argument too many times. I could hang up, Tony Angel thought, but he stayed on the phone-perhaps out of pity for the shipyard worker.

“It’ll cost you six or seven dollars a cord to get logs to the mill over land!” Ketchum shouted. “Most roads in northern New England aren’t worth shit to begin with, and now there’ll be nothing but asshole truck drivers on them! You may think it’s already a world of accidents, Cookie, but imagine an overloaded logging truck tipping over and crushing a carload of skiers!”

Ketchum had been right; there’d been some terrible accidents involving logging trucks. In northern New England, it used to be that you could drive all over the place-according to Ketchum, only a moose or a drunken driver could kill you. Now the trucks were on the big roads and the little ones; the asshole truck drivers were everywhere.

“This asshole country!” Ketchum had bellowed into the phone. “It’ll always find a way to make something that was cheap expensive, and to take a bunch of jobs away from fellas in the process!”

There was an abrupt end to their conversation. In that bar in Bath, the sounds of an argument rose indistinctly; a violent scuffle ensued. No doubt somebody in the bar had objected to Ketchum defaming the entire country-in all likelihood, the aforementioned asshole shipyard worker. (“Some asshole patriot,” Ketchum later called the fella.)

THE COOK LIKED LISTENING to the radio when he started his pizza dough in the morning. Nunzi had taught him to always let a pizza dough rise twice; perhaps this was a silly habit, but he’d stuck to it. Paul Polcari, a superb pizza chef, had told Tony Angel that two rises were better than one, but that the second rise wasn’t absolutely necessary. In the cookhouse kitchen in Twisted River, the cook’s pizza dough had lacked one ingredient he now believed was essential.

Long ago, he’d said to those fat sawmill workers’ wives-Dot and May, those bad old broads-that he thought his crust could stand to be sweeter. Dot (the one who’d tricked him into feeling her up) said, “You’re crazy, Cookie-you make the best pizza crust I’ve ever eaten.”

“Maybe it needs honey,” the then Dominic Baciagalupo had told her. But it turned out that he was out of honey; he’d tried adding a little maple syrup instead. That was a bad idea-you could taste the maple. Then he’d forgotten about the honey idea until May reminded him. She’d bumped him, on purpose, with her big hip while handing him the honey jar.

The cook had never forgiven May for her remark about Injun Jane-when she’d said that Dot and herself weren’t “Injun enough” to satisfy him.

“Here, Cookie,” May had said. “It’s honey for your pizza dough.”

“I changed my mind about it,” he told her, but the only reason he hadn’t tried putting honey in his dough was that he didn’t want to give May the satisfaction.

It was in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli where Paul Polcari first showed Tony Angel his pizza-dough recipe. In addition to the flour and water, and the yeast, Nunzi had always added a little olive oil to the dough-not more than a tablespoon or two, per pizza. Paul had shown the cook how to add an amount of honey about equal to the oil. The oil made the dough silky-you could bake the crust when it was thin, without its becoming too dry and brittle. The honey-as the cook himself had nearly discovered, back in Twisted River-made the crust a little sweet, but you never tasted the honey part.

Tony Angel rarely started a pizza dough without remembering how he’d almost invented the honey part of his recipe. The cook hadn’t thought of big Dot and even bigger May in years. He was fifty-nine that morning he thought of them in his Brattleboro kitchen. How old would those old bitches be? Tony Angel wondered; surely they’d be in their sixties. He remembered that May had a slew of grandchildren-some of them the same age as her children with her second husband.

Then the radio distracted Tony from his thoughts; he missed what he imagined as the Dominic in himself, and the radio reminded him of all he missed. It had been better back in Boston -both the radio station they’d listened to in Vicino di Napoli and the music. The music had been awful in the fifties, the cook thought, and then it got so unbelievably good in the sixties and seventies; now it was borderline awful again. He liked George Strait -“ Amarillo by Morning” and “You Look So Good in Love”-but this very day they’d played two Michael Jackson songs in a row (“Billie Jean” and “Beat It”). Tony Angel detested Michael Jackson. The cook believed it was beneath Paul McCartney to have done “The Girl Is Mine” with Jackson; they had played that song, too, earlier in the morning. Now it was Duran Duran on the radio-“Hungry Like the Wolf.”

The music really had been better in Boston, in the sixties. Even old Joe Polcari had sung along with Bob Dylan. Paul Polcari would bang on the pasta pot to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and in addition to The Rolling Stones and all the Dylan, there were Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. Tony imagined he could still hear how Carmella sang “The Sound of Silence;” they had danced together in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli to “Eight Days a Week” and “Ticket to Ride” and “We Can Work It Out.” And don’t forget there’d been “ Penny Lane ” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles had changed everything.

The cook shut off the radio in his Brattleboro kitchen. He tried to sing “All You Need Is Love” to himself instead of listening to the radio, but neither Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, nor Tony Angel had ever been able to sing, and it wasn’t long before that Beatles’ song began to resemble a song by The Doors (“Light My Fire”), which gave the cook a most unwelcome memory of his former daughter-in-law, Katie. She’d been a big fan of The Doors and The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The cook kind of liked The Doors and The Dead, but Katie had done a Grace Slick impersonation that made it impossible for Tony Angel to like Jefferson Airplane-“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” especially.

He remembered that time, just before Daniel and his wife and the baby had left for Iowa, when Daniel brought Joe to Boston to stay with the cook and Carmella. Daniel and Katie were going to a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in New York; someone in Katie’s la-di-da family had gotten her the tickets. It was August; over fifty thousand people had attended that concert. Carmella loved taking care of little Joe-he’d been a March baby, like his father, so the boy had been only five months old at the time-but both Katie and Daniel were drunk when they came to the North End to pick up their baby.

They must have been smashed when they left New York, and they’d driven drunk the whole way to Boston. Dominic would not let them take Joe. “You’re not driving back to New Hampshire with the baby-not in your condition,” the cook told his son.

That was when Katie did her sluttish swaying and singing-vamping her way through “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Neither Carmella nor the cook could bear to look at Grace Slick after Katie’s lewd, provocative performance.

“Come on, Dad,” Danny said to his father. “We’re fine to drive. Let little Joe come with us-we can’t all sleep in this apartment.”

“You’ll just have to, Daniel,” his father told him. “Joe can sleep in our room, with Carmella and me, and you and Katie will just have to find a way to fit in the single bed in your room-neither one of you is a large person,” the cook reminded the young couple.

Danny was angry, but he held his temper. It was Katie who behaved badly. She went into the bathroom and peed with the door open-they could all hear her. Daniel gave his dad a look that said, Well, what did you expect? Carmella went into her bedroom and closed the door. (Little Joe was already asleep in there.) When Katie came out of the bathroom, she was naked.

Katie spoke to Danny as if her father-in-law weren’t there. “Come on. If we have to do it in a single bed, let’s get started.”

Of course the cook knew that his son and Katie didn’t really have noisy sex then and there, but that’s what Katie wanted Danny’s dad and Carmella to believe; she carried on like she was having an orgasm every minute. Both Danny and his wife were so drunk that they slept right through little Joe’s nightmare later that night.

The cook and his son didn’t speak to each other when Daniel left with his wife and child the next day; Carmella didn’t look at Katie. But shortly before the would-be writer Daniel Baciagalupo took his family to Iowa, the cook had called his son.

“If you keep drinking the way you are, you won’t write anything worth reading. The next day, you won’t even remember what you wrote the day before,” the young writer’s father told him. “I stopped drinking because I couldn’t handle it, Daniel. Well, maybe it’s genetic-maybe you can’t handle drinking, either.”

Tony Angel didn’t know what had happened to his son in Iowa City, but something had made Daniel stop drinking. Tony didn’t really want to know what had happened to his beloved boy in Iowa, because the cook was certain that Katie had had something to do with it.

WHEN HE FINISHED WITH THE PIZZA DOUGH-the dough was having its first rise in the big bowls the cook covered with damp dish towels-Tony Angel limped up Main Street to The Book Cellar. He was fond of the young woman who ran the bookstore; she was always nice to him, and she often ate in his restaurant. Tony would buy her a bottle of wine on occasion. He cracked the same joke whenever he came into The Book Cellar.

“Have you got any women to introduce to me today?” Tony always asked her. “Someone about my age-or a little younger, maybe.”

The cook really liked Brattleboro, and having his own restaurant. He had hated Vermont those first few years-better said, it was Putney he’d hated. Putney had an alternative style about it. (“Putney is an alternative to a town,” the cook now liked to say to people.)

Tony had missed the North End-“something wicked,” as Ketchum would say-and Putney was full of self-advertising hippies and other dropouts. There was even a commune a few miles out of town; the name of it had the word clover in it, but Tony couldn’t remember what the rest of it was. He believed it was a women-only commune, which led the cook to suspect they were all lesbians.

And the butcher in the Putney Food Co-op kept cutting herself, or himself; cutting yourself wasn’t what a butcher was supposed to do, and Tony thought the butcher’s sex was “indeterminable.”

“For God’s sake, Dad, the butcher is clearly a woman,” Danny told his father, with exasperation.

“You say she is, but have you taken all her clothes off-just to be sure?” his dad asked him.

Yet Tony Angel had opened his own pizza place in Putney, and despite the cook’s constant complaints about Windham College-it didn’t look like a “real” college to him (never mind that he’d not been to college), and all the college kids were “assholes”-the pizza place did very well, largely because of the Windham students.

“Constipated Christ, don’t call it Angel’s Pizza-or anything with the Angel name in it,” Ketchum had told the cook. In retrospect, Ketchum had grown increasingly uncomfortable with Danny and his father choosing the name Angel-in case Carl ever remembered that the death of the original Angel had been coincident with the cook and his son leaving town in the first place. As for little Joe’s name, Danny had chosen it, though he’d wanted to name his son after his dad-Dominic, Jr. (Katie hadn’t liked either the Dominic or the Junior.) But Danny had refused to give little Joe the writer’s nom de plume. Joe had remained a Baciagalupo; the boy didn’t become an Angel. Both Danny and the cook remembered that Carl hadn’t been able to pronounce Baciagalupo; they told Ketchum it was unlikely the cowboy could spell it, either-not even to save his own fat ass. So what if Joe was still a Baciagalupo? Ketchum just had to live with it. And now Ketchum kept complaining about the Angel name!

The cook often dreamed of that asshole Gennaro Capodilupo, his runaway father. Tony Angel could still hear the names of those two hill towns, which were also provinces, in the vicinity of Naples -those words his mother, Nunzi, had murmured in her sleep: Benevento and Avellino. Tony believed that his father really had gone back to the vicinity of Naples, where he’d come from. But the truth was, the cook didn’t care. When someone abandons you, why should you care?

“And don’t get cute and call the pizza place Vicinity of Naples,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I know the cowboy doesn’t speak Italian, but any fool might one day figure out that Vicino di Napoli, or however the fuck you say it, means ‘in the Vicinity of Naples.’”

So the cook had called his Putney pizza place Benevento; it was always the first of the two towns or provinces Annunziata had uttered in her sleep, and no one but Tony Angel had heard his mother say it. The goddamn cowboy couldn’t possibly come up with any connections to Benevento.

“Shit, it sure sounds Italian-I’ll give you that, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.

The Putney pizza place had been right on Route 5, just before the fork in the center of town, where Route 5 continued north, past the paper mill and a tourist trap called Basketville. Windham College was a little farther north, up Route 5. The left-hand fork, where the Putney General Store was-and the Putney Food Co-op, with the self-lacerating butcher of “indeterminable” sex-went off in the direction of Westminster West. Out that way was the Putney School-a prep school Danny disdained, because he thought it wasn’t up to Exeter’s standards-and, on Hickory Ridge Road, where the writer Danny Angel still lived, there was an independent elementary school called the Grammar School, which had been very much up to Danny’s standards.

He’d sent Joe there, and the boy had done well enough to get into Northfield Mount Hermon-a prep school Danny did approve of. NMH, as the school was called, was about half an hour south of Brattleboro, in Massachusetts-and an hour’s drive from Danny’s property in Putney. Joe, who was a senior in the spring of 1983, saw quite a lot of his dad and his grandfather.

In his Brattleboro apartment, the cook had a guest bedroom that was always ready for his grandson. Tony had torn out the kitchen in that apartment, but he’d kept the plumbing intact; he had built quite a spacious bathroom, which overlooked the Connecticut. The bathtub was big and reminded the cook of the one Carmella had had in her kitchen in that cold-water Charter Street apartment. Tony still didn’t know for certain that Daniel had spied on Carmella in that bathtub, but he’d read all five of his son’s novels, and in one of them there’s a luscious-looking Italian woman who luxuriates in taking long baths. The woman’s stepson is of an age where he’s just beginning to masturbate, and the boy beats off while watching his stepmother bathe. (The clever kid bores a hole in the bathroom wall; his bedroom is conveniently next to the bathroom.)

While there were these little details of a recognizable kind in Danny Angel’s novels, the cook more often noticed things that he was sure his son must have made up. If Carmella had put in an identifiable bathtub appearance, the character of the stepmother in that novel was definitely not based on Carmella; nor could the cook find any but the most superficial elements of himself in Daniel’s novels, or much of Ketchum. (A minor character’s broken wrist is mentioned in passing in one novel, and there’s a different character’s penchant for saying, “Constipated Christ!” in another.) Both Ketchum and Tony Angel had talked about the absence of anyone in the novels who revealed to them their quintessential and beloved Daniel.

“Where is that boy hiding himself?” Ketchum had asked the cook, because even in Danny Angel’s fourth (and most famous) novel, which was titled The Kennedy Fathers, the main character-who escapes the war in Vietnam with the same paternity deferment that kept Danny out of the war-bears little essential resemblance to the Daniel that Ketchum and the cook knew and loved.

There was a character based on Katie in The Kennedy Fathers-Caitlin, Danny Angel named her-a little sprite of a thing with a disproportionately oversize capacity for serial infidelities. She saves a truly hard-to-believe number of Kennedy fathers from the Vietnam War. The Caitlin character races through numerous husbands with the same casual frankness both the cook and Ketchum associated with the way Katie probably gave blow jobs-yet Caitlin wasn’t Katie.

“She’s way too nice,” Tony Angel told his old friend.

“I’ll say she is!” Ketchum agreed. “You even end up liking her!”

All her husbands end up liking Caitlin, too-or they can’t get over her, if that amounts to the same thing. And all those babies who are born and get abandoned by their mother-well, we never find out what they think of their mother. The novel concludes when President Nixon puts an end to the 3-A deferment, while the war will drag on for five more years, and the Caitlin character just kind of disappears; she is a lost soul in the last chapter of The Kennedy Fathers. There’s something that doesn’t bode well about how she phones all her husbands and asks to speak to her kids, who have no memory of her. That’s the last we hear about Caitlin-it’s a sympathetic moment.

Ketchum and the cook knew very well that Katie had not once called Daniel and asked to speak to Joe; it seemed that she simply hadn’t cared enough about them to even inquire how they were doing, though Ketchum always said that Danny might hear from Katie if he ever became famous.

When The Kennedy Fathers was published, and Danny did become famous, he still didn’t hear from Katie. He did, however, hear from a few other Kennedy fathers. Most of the letters about the novel were favorable. Danny believed there was some shared guilt among such fathers, who’d all felt, at one time in their lives, that they probably should have gone to Vietnam, or (like Danny) they’d actually wanted to go. Now, of course, they all knew they were lucky that they hadn’t gone to the war.

The novel was praised for seeing yet another dimension of how the war in Vietnam did permanent damage to America, and how the country would long be divided by that war. The young fathers in the novel might (or might not) turn out to be good fathers, and it was too soon to say if those children-those “tickets out of Vietnam,” as Danny called them-would be damaged. Most reviewers thought that Caitlin was the novel’s most memorable character, and the real hero of the story. She sacrifices herself to save these young men’s lives, even though she leaves them-and quite possibly her own children-feeling haunted.

But the novel really pissed off Ketchum and the cook. They had hoped to read a hatchet job on Katie. But Danny didn’t do that; instead, he’d turned his awful ex-wife into a fucking hero!

One letter Danny received from a Kennedy father was worth saving, and he would show it to his son-this was several years after The Kennedy Fathers was first published, in the spring of Joe’s junior year at Northfield Mount Hermon, when the boy had been driving for only a year and had just turned seventeen. At young Joe’s suggestion, Danny also showed the letter to his dad and Ketchum. While Danny and Joe had talked about the letter-both about what it meant, and what it didn’t say-Ketchum and the cook were careful in their responses to Danny. The older men knew that Danny’s feelings for Katie were a little different from theirs.

The letter was from a self-described “single parent” living in Portland, Oregon -a man named Jeff Reese. The letter began: “Like you, I am a Kennedy father-one of the stupid boys Katie Callahan saved. I’m not sure how many of us there are. I know of at least one other-I mean, in addition to you and me-and I am writing him, too. I regret to inform you both that Katie couldn’t save herself-just a few of us stupid boys. I can’t tell you more, but I know it was an accidental overdose.” He didn’t say of what. Perhaps Jeff Reese assumed that Danny would have known what substance Katie was abusing, but they’d not done any serious drugs together, only the occasional marijuana. In their case, the drinking and a little pot had been more than enough. (There wasn’t a word about The Kennedy Fathers, though one would guess that Jeff Reese had somewhat belatedly read it. Maybe he’d read just enough of the book to see for himself that the Caitlin character wasn’t really Katie. And if Katie had read The Kennedy Fathers, or any of Danny Angel’s other novels, Jeff Reese didn’t say; at least Katie must have known that Daniel Baciagalupo had become Danny Angel, for how else would Jeff Reese have made the connection?)

Danny had driven down to Northfield Mount Hermon for an impromptu visit with Joe at his son’s school. The old James Gym was empty-it wasn’t wrestling season-and they sat together on the sloped wooden track, reading and rereading the letter about Joe’s mother. Maybe the boy had thought he would one day hear from his mom; Danny had never expected to hear from Katie, but the writer in him had thought she might try to make contact with her son.

At seventeen, Joe Baciagalupo often looked like he needed a shave, and he had the more defined facial features of a young man in his early twenties; yet there was something expectant and open in his expression that reminded his father of a more childlike Joe, or of the “little” Joe the boy had been. This might have made Danny say to him, “I’m sorry that you didn’t have a mother, or that I didn’t find someone who could have done a good job in that role for you.”

“But it’s not just a role, is it?” Joe asked his dad; he was still holding the letter about his mother dying from an overdose, and Danny would later think that the way the seventeen-year-old looked at the letter, it was as if it were foreign currency-a curiosity, exotic-looking, but of no particular use at the moment. “I mean, I had you-you’ve always been there,” Joe continued. “And your dad-well, you know, he’s like a second dad to me. And then there’s Ketchum.”

“Yes,” was all the writer could say; when he talked to young Joe, Danny sometimes didn’t know if he was talking to a child or a man. Was it part of the same anxiousness Danny had felt as a twelve-year-old that he suspected Joe kept things from him, or was it what Ketchum and the cook had kept from Danny that made him wonder about how forthcoming (or not) Joe was?

“I just want to be sure you’re okay,” Danny said to Joe, but the seventeen-year-old-child or man, or both-surely knew that by the okay word his father was implying much more than okay. The writer meant thriving; Danny also meant safe, as if regular father-son conversations could possibly ensure Joe’s safety. (The child’s or the man’s.) Yet, as Danny would one day consider, maybe this was a writer’s peculiar burden-namely, that the anxiety he felt as a father was conflated with the analysis he brought to bear on the characters in his fiction.

The day he showed Joe the letter about Katie, it struck Danny Angel that the news of Katie’s death had an offstage, unreal quality; the distant report, from a stranger, had the effect of turning Katie into a minor fictional character. And if Danny had kept up the drinking with her, he would have turned out the same way-either an accident or a suicide, the finale disappointingly offstage. His dad had been right about the drinking; maybe not being able to handle it was, as his father had suggested, “genetic.”

“AT LEAST HE HASN’T WRITTEN about Rosie-not yet,” Ketchum wrote to his old friend.

Tony Angel had liked Ketchum’s letters better before the old logger, who was now sixty-six, had learned to read. That lady he’d met in the library-“the schoolteacher” was all Ketchum ever called her-well, she’d done the job, but Ketchum was even crankier now that he could read and write, and the cook was convinced that Ketchum no longer listened as attentively. When you don’t read, you have to listen; maybe those books the woodsman had heard were the books he’d understood best. Now Ketchum complained about almost everything he read. It also might have been that Tony Angel missed Six-Pack’s handwriting. (In Ketchum’s opinion, by the way, the cook had gotten crankier, too.)

Danny definitely missed Six-Pack Pam’s influence on Ketchum; possibly his dependence on Pam had made Ketchum less lonely than he seemed to Danny now, and Danny had long ago accepted Six-Pack’s role as a go-between in Ketchum’s correspondence with the young writer and his dad.

Danny was forty-one in 1983. When men turn forty, most of them no longer feel young, but Joe-at eighteen-knew he had a relatively young dad. Even the girls Joe’s age (and younger) at Northfield Mount Hermon had told the boy that his famous father was very good-looking. Maybe Danny was good-looking, but he wasn’t nearly as good-looking as Joe.

The young man was almost eight inches taller than his dad and grandfather. Katie, the boy’s mother, had been a noticeably small woman, but the men in the Callahan family were uniformly tall-not heavy but very tall. Their height went with their “patrician airs,” the cook had declared.

He and Carmella had hated the wedding; they’d felt snubbed the whole time. It had been a lavish affair, at an expensive private club in Manhattan -Katie was already a couple of months pregnant-and for all the money the party cost, the food had been inedible. The Callahans weren’t food people; they were the kind of ice-cube suckers who had too many cocktails and filled themselves with endless hors d’oeuvres. They looked like they had so much money that they didn’t need to eat-that was what Tony Angel told Ketchum, who was still driving logs on the Kennebec at the time. He’d told Danny he had too much to do in Maine and couldn’t come to the wedding. But the real reason Ketchum hadn’t gone to the wedding was that the cook had asked him not to come.

“I know you, Ketchum-you’ll bring your Browning knife and a twelve-gauge. You’ll kill every Callahan you can identify, Katie included, and then you’ll go to work on a couple of Danny’s fingers with the Browning.”

“I know you feel the same way I do, Cookie.”

“Yes, I do,” the cook admitted to his best friend, “and Carmella even agrees with us. But we’ve got to let Daniel do this his way. The Callahan whore is going to have someone’s baby, and that baby will keep mine out of this disastrous war.”

So Ketchum had stayed in Maine. The logger would later say it was a good thing Cookie had gone to the wedding. When Joe turned out to be tall, the cook might have been inclined to believe that his beloved Daniel couldn’t have been the boy’s father. After all, Katie fucked anyone she wanted to; she could easily have been knocked up by someone else and then married Daniel. But the wedding offered proof that there was a gene for tall men in the Callahan family, and Joe turned out to be the spitting image of Danny; it was just that the top of his dad’s head came up only to the top of the young man’s chest.

Joe had the body of an oarsman, but he wasn’t a rower. For the most part, he’d grown up in Vermont -the boy was an experienced downhill skier. His dad didn’t much care for the sport; as a runner, he preferred cross-country skiing, when he skied at all. Danny had continued to run; it still helped him to think, and to imagine things.

Joe was a wrestler at Northfield Mount Hermon, though he didn’t have the body of a wrestler. It was probably Ketchum’s influence that made Joe choose wrestling, the cook thought. (Ketchum was just a barroom brawler, but wrestling came closer to describing Ketchum’s favorite kind of fight than boxing did. Usually, Ketchum didn’t hit people until he got them down on the ground.)

The first time Ketchum had gone to one of Joe’s wrestling matches at NMH, the barroom brawler hadn’t understood the sport very well. Joe had scored a takedown, and his opponent lay stretched out on his side, when Ketchum shouted, “Now hit him-hit him now!”

“Ketchum,” Danny said, “there’s no hitting allowed-it’s a wrestling match.”

“Christ, that’s the best time to hit a fella,” Ketchum said, “when you’ve got him stretched out like that.”

Later in that same match, Joe had his opponent in a near-pin position; Joe had sunk a half nelson around the other wrestler’s neck and was tilting him toward his back.

“Joe’s got his arm around the wrong side of the neck,” Ketchum complained to the cook. “You can’t choke someone with your arm around the back of a fella’s neck-you’ve got to be on his fucking throat!”

“Joe’s trying to pin that guy on his back, Ketchum-he’s not trying to choke him!” Tony Angel told his old friend.

“Choking is illegal,” Danny explained.

Joe won his match, and, after all the matches were over, Ketchum went to shake the boy’s hand. That was when Ketchum stepped on a wrestling mat for the first time. When the woodsman felt the mat yield under his foot, he stepped quickly back to the hardwood floor of the gym; it was as if he’d stepped on something alive. “Shit, that’s the first problem,” Ketchum said. “The mat’s too soft-you can’t really hurt a guy on it.”

“Ketchum, you’re not trying to hurt your opponent-just pin him, or beat him on points,” Danny tried to explain. But the next thing they knew, Ketchum was attempting to show Joe a better way to crank someone over on his back.

“You get him down on his belly, and pull one of his arms behind his back,” Ketchum said with enthusiasm. “Then you get a little leverage under the fella’s forearm, and you drive his right elbow till it touches his left ear. Believe me, he’ll turn over-if he doesn’t want to lose his whole shoulder!”

“You can’t bend someone’s arm past a forty-five-degree angle,” Joe told the old logger. “Submission holds and choke holds used to be legal, but nowadays you can’t make someone yield to pain-that’s called a submission hold-and you can’t choke anyone. Those things aren’t legal-not anymore.”

“Constipated Christ-it’s like everything else!” Ketchum complained. “They take what was once a good thing and fuck it up with rules!”

But after Ketchum had seen a few more of Joe’s matches, he grew to like high school wrestling. “Hell, to be honest with you, Cookie, when I first saw it, I thought it was a sissy way to fight. But once you get the idea of it, you can actually tell who would win the match if it was taking place in a parking lot and there was no referee.”

Joe was surprised by how many matches Ketchum attended. The old woodsman drove all over New England to see Joe and the NMH team wrestle. They had a pretty good team in Joe’s senior year. In Joe’s four years at Northfield Mount Hermon, Ketchum definitely saw more of the boy’s wrestling matches than his father or grandfather did.

The matches were on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tony Angel’s Brattleboro restaurant was closed Wednesday, so that Tony could see some of his grandson’s wrestling matches. But the cook could never find the time to see Joe wrestle on a Saturday, and it seemed that the more important matches-the season-ending tournaments, for example-were on the weekends. Danny Angel got to see more than half of his son’s matches, but the writer took a lot of publishing-related trips. It was Ketchum who went to almost all of Joe’s “fights,” as the logger was inclined to call them.

“You missed a good fight,” Ketchum would say, when he called the cook or Danny to tell them the results of young Joe’s wrestling matches.

UNTIL HE HAD A BESTSELLER with The Kennedy Fathers, Danny didn’t know that publishing houses had publicity departments. Now that his publishers were promoting his books, Danny felt an obligation to do some traveling on the books’ behalf. And the translations were published at different times, rarely simultaneously with the English-language editions. This meant that it was unusual for a year to go by without Danny going somewhere to do a book tour.

When it wasn’t wrestling season and his dad was traveling, Joe often spent weekends at his grandfather’s apartment in Brattleboro. Sometimes his friends from Northfield Mount Hermon would have their parents take them out to dinner at Tony Angel’s Italian restaurant. Occasionally, Joe would help out in the kitchen. It was like old times, and not like them, the cook would think-seeing his grandson instead of his son in a working kitchen, or busing tables. Tony, né Dominic, was reminded that he’d not seen as much of Daniel in those prep-school years as he now saw of Joe. Because of this, there was something bittersweet about the cook’s relationship with his grandson; almost magically, there were times when Tony Angel got to relax with Joe-without once judging the boy the way the cook had felt compelled to judge (and criticize) Daniel.

The other guys on Joe’s wrestling team had grown fond of Ketchum. “Is he your uncle-that tough-looking man with the scar?” the wrestlers would ask Joe.

“No, Ketchum’s just a friend of the family-he was a river driver,” Joe would tell them.

One day, Joe’s wrestling coach asked him, “Did that big man with the hard handshake ever wrestle? He kind of looks like he might have, or could have.”

“Not officially,” Joe answered.

“What about that scar?” the coach asked Joe. “That’s a nasty one-better than your average head-butt, anyway.”

“That was no head-butt-that was a bear,” Joe told the coach.

“A bear!”

“Just don’t ever ask Ketchum about it,” Joe said. “It’s a terrible story. Ketchum had to kill the bear, but he didn’t want to. He likes bears, generally.”

There was a bit of the writer Danny Angel in Joe Baciagalupo, clearly-a deeper ingredient than a physical resemblance. But Danny worried that there was something reckless about his son; it wasn’t a Baciagalupo recklessness of the imagination, either. It also wasn’t the wrestling, which was nothing Danny had ever wanted to do-and the cook couldn’t have imagined doing it, not with that limp. In fact, the wrestling seemed safe enough-once Joe had learned a little about it. There was another element in young Joe that Danny didn’t recognize as coming from himself or his dad.

If there was an active Katie Callahan gene in the boy, maybe it was his penchant for risk-taking. He skied too fast, he drove a car too fast, and he was more than fast with girls; it seemed to his writer father that Joe just took too many chances.

“Maybe that’s the Katie in him,” Danny had said to his dad.

“Maybe,” the cook replied; Tony Angel didn’t like to think that anything of that awful woman had gotten into his grandson. “Then again, it might be your mother, Daniel. Rosie was a risk-taker, after all-just ask Ketchum.”

In the time he’d spent looking at those photographs of his mother, Danny could have written a novel-though he’d stopped looking at the photos, for a while, after he learned the truth about his mom and Ketchum and his father. He’d once tried to give the photos to his dad, but Tony Angel wouldn’t take them. “No, they’re yours-I can see her very clearly, Daniel.” His father tapped his temple. “Up here.”

“Maybe Ketchum would like the photos,” Danny said.

“Ketchum has his own pictures of your mother, Daniel,” the cook told him.

Over time, a few of those photos Danny had pressed flat between the pages of the novels left behind in Twisted River-some of them, but no way near all of them-had been sent to him by Ketchum. “Here, I found this picture in one of her books,” the accompanying letter from Ketchum would say. “I thought you should have it, Danny.”

Albeit reluctantly, Danny had kept the photos. Joe liked to look at them. Perhaps the cook was right: Maybe Joe got some of his risk-taking or reckless instincts from his grandmother, not from Katie. When Danny looked at his mom’s pictures, he saw a pretty woman with intense blue eyes, but the drunken rebel who’d do-si-doed two drunken men on the black ice of Twisted River-well, that element of Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wasn’t evident in the photos her son had kept.

“Just keep an eye on his drinking,” the cook had told his son-he meant young Joe’s drinking. (It was Tony Angel’s way of inquiring if his eighteen-year-old grandson was drinking yet.)

“I suppose there’s the occasional party,” Danny told his dad, “but Joe doesn’t drink around me.”

“The kind of drinking Joe might do around you isn’t the kind we need to worry about,” the cook said.

Joe’s drinking would bear watching, the writer Danny Angel imagined. As for his son’s genetic package, Danny knew more than he cared to remember about the boy’s mom, Katie Callahan; she’d had one whale of an alcohol problem. And in Katie’s case, she’d done more than the “occasional” marijuana, when she and Danny had been a couple-she’d smoked more than a “little” pot, Danny knew.

IT COULD BE ARGUED that Windham College was in its death throes before the end of the Vietnam War. Decreasing enrollment and an inability to meet a loan repayment would force the college to close in 1978, but Danny Angel sensed that there were signs of trouble ahead for Windham well before then. The writer would resign from the college in 1972, when he accepted a teaching job back at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. He’d not written The Kennedy Fathers yet; Danny still had to teach for a living, and for teaching-writing jobs, Iowa is as good as they get. (You have students who are serious, and busy with their own writing, which means you get lots of time to write.)

Danny Angel would publish his second novel and write his third when he was again in Iowa City. In those years, before Joe was a teenager, Iowa City was a great town for Danny’s son, too-pretty good schools, as one would expect in a university town, and a semblance of neighborhood life. Iowa City wasn’t the North End, to be sure-not when it came to restaurants, especially-but Danny had liked being back there.

The writer gave his dad a choice: Tony Angel could come to Iowa City or he could stay in Putney. Danny wanted to keep the Vermont farmhouse. He’d bought the rental property on Hickory Ridge Road, just before he accepted the Iowa offer and resigned from Windham, because he wanted his father to be able to stay in Windham County -if the cook wanted to.

In the cook’s mind, Carmella was the question. For the five years Tony Angel ran the Benevento pizza place in Putney, he’d taken a lot of shopping trips to Boston. It was more than a two-hour drive each way-kind of far for “shopping.” Danny’s dad claimed that he had to buy his pizza sausages at the Abruzzese meat market in the North End-and while he was in his old neighborhood, he might as well stock up on his cheeses, his olives, and his olive oil. But Danny knew that his dad was trying to “stock up” on as much of Carmella as he could. They hadn’t really been able to break things off cleanly.

The cook had invested very little in Benevento; compared to where he’d worked before, in both Coos County and Boston, a pizza place in a poor man’s college town had been relatively easy. He’d bought the building from an aging hippie who’d called himself The Sign Painter; it had looked to Tony Angel like a failing small business, and there was a rumor in town that the sign painter was responsible for the misspelling of the theatre word on the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro. (The word on the marquee of the Main Street movie house was spelled “Theater,” not “Theatre;” for years, the Latchis had sought funds to correct the mistake.) It was no rumor that the sign painter’s wife, an allegedly flaky potter, had recently run out on him. All she’d left the miserable sign painter was her kiln, which gave the cook the idea for his brick pizza oven.

At the time Danny invited him to come to Iowa City, Tony was a little tired of running his own restaurant-a pizza place wasn’t quite the kind of restaurant the cook wanted to own, anyway-and things with Carmella had pretty much run their course. Seeing each other only occasionally, she’d told the cook, had made her feel she was in an illicit relationship instead of a legitimate one. The illicit word sounded to Tony like something that might have come up when Carmella had been confessing her sins-either at St. Leonard or St. Stephen’s, wherever Carmella did her confessing. (Confessing one’s sins was a Catholic thing that had never caught on with the cook.)

Why not just see what the Midwest was like? Tony Angel thought. If he sold it now, the cook could get a little money for Benevento -whereas, if he waited, and if Windham College was going under, which Danny said it was, what would anyone want with a pizza place in Putney?

“Why don’t you just let a fire get out of control in your pizza oven, and then collect the insurance?” Ketchum had asked his old friend.

“Did you burn down Twisted River?” the cook asked Ketchum.

“Hell, it was a ghost town when it burned-it was nothing but an eyesore, Cookie!”

“Those buildings, my cookhouse among them, weren’t nothing, Ketchum.”

“Shit, if that’s how you feel about a little fire, maybe you should just sell your pizza place,” the cook’s old friend told him.

It was hardly a “little” fire that took down what had been the town of Twisted River. Ketchum had planned the torching to perfection. He chose a windless night in March, before mud season; it was before Carl had stopped drinking, too, which was why Ketchum got away with it. No one was able to find the deputy sheriff; in all probability, you couldn’t have woken up the cowboy if you’d found him.

If there’d been any wind, Ketchum would have had to light only one fire-to burn both the town and the cookhouse. But he might have started a forest fire in the process-even in what had been a typically wet month of March, when there was still a lot of snow on the ground. Ketchum wasn’t taking any chances. He liked the forest-it was the town of Twisted River and the cookhouse that he hated. (The night Rosie died, Ketchum had almost cut off his left hand in the cookhouse kitchen; he’d heard Cookie crying himself to sleep while Jane had stayed upstairs with the cook and little Danny.)

The night Twisted River burned, Ketchum must have had three-quarters of a cord of firewood in his truck. He divided the wood between the two bonfires he built-one at the abandoned sawmill in town, the other in what had been the cookhouse kitchen. He set both fires within minutes of each other, and watched them burn to the ground before morning. He used some fancy pine-scented lamp oil to ignite the bonfires; either kerosene or gasoline might have left some residue of themselves, and surely both would have left a taint in the air. But there’d been nothing left of the lamp oil, with its innocent pine scent-not to mention the well-seasoned firewood he’d used to start both fires.

“You know anythin’ ’bout that fire in Twisted River last night, Ketchum?” Carl asked him the following day, after the hungover deputy sheriff had driven to the site of the devastation. “The tire tracks back in there looked like your truck to me.”

“Oh, I was back in there, all right,” Ketchum told the cop. “It was a helluva fire, cowboy-you should have seen it! It burned damn-near all night! I just took a beer or two and drove back in there to watch it.” (It was a pity that the deputy had stopped drinking, Ketchum would say in later years.)

They were not on friendlier terms these days-the cowboy and Ketchum-now that Carl knew the Baciagalupo boy had killed Injun Jane with a skillet, and all the rest of it. Jane’s death had been an accident, the deputy sheriff understood; according to Ketchum, her death probably didn’t matter all that much to Carl, though the cop was pissed at Ketchum for never telling him the truth. What really mattered to the cowboy was that Cookie had been fucking Jane-at a time when Jane “belonged” to Carl. That was why Carl wanted to kill the cook; the deputy had made himself clear to Ketchum on that point.

“I know you won’t tell me where Cookie is, Ketchum, but you tell that little cripple for me-I’m gonna find him,” the cowboy said. “And you better watch your back, if you know what’s good for you.”

“I’m always watching my back, Carl,” Ketchum told him. The old woodsman didn’t say a word about his dog, that “fine animal.” If the cowboy came after Ketchum, the veteran logger wanted the dog to be a surprise. Naturally, everyone who lived year-round on the upper Androscoggin must have known that Ketchum had a dog-Carl included. The animal rode around in Ketchum’s truck. It was the dog’s ferocity that Ketchum had managed to keep secret. (Of course it couldn’t have been the same fine animal protecting Ketchum for sixteen years; the present watchdog had to have been the son or grandson of that first fine animal, the dog who’d replaced Six-Pack Pam.)

“I told you,” Ketchum would say, to both Danny and his dad. “ New Hampshire is next to Vermont -that’s too close for comfort, in my opinion. I think it’s a terrific idea for you both to go to Iowa. I’m sure little Joe will love it out there, too. It’s another Injun name, Iowa -isn’t it? Boy, those Injuns were once all over, weren’t they? And just look what this country did to them! It kind of makes you wonder about our country’s intentions, doesn’t it? Vietnam wasn’t the first thing that made us look bad. And where this asshole country is headed-well, maybe those Injuns lying underground in Iowa, and all over, might just say that we’re one day going to get what’s coming to us.”

HOW WOULD ONE describe Ketchum’s politics? the cook was thinking, as he limped down Brattleboro ’s Main Street, making his slow way back to his restaurant from The Book Cellar.

LIVE FREE OR DIE

That’s what it said on the New Hampshire license plates; Ketchum was clearly a live-free-or-die man, and he’d always believed that the country was going to Hell, but Tony Angel was wondering if his old friend had ever even voted. The woodsman was disinclined to trust any government, or anyone who took part in it. In Ketchum’s opinion, the only justification for having laws-for abiding by any rules, really-was that the assholes outnumbered the sensible fellas. (And of course the laws didn’t apply to Ketchum; he’d lived without rules, except those of his own making.)

The cook stopped walking and looked admiringly down the hill at his very own restaurant-the one he’d always wanted.

AVELLINO

ITALIAN COOKING

Avellino was that other hill town (also a province) in the vicinity of Naples; it had always been the second word Nunzi murmured in her sleep. And the sign said COOKING, not CUISINE-for the same reason that Tony Angel thought of himself and called himself a cook, not a chef. He would always be just a cook, Tony thought; he believed he wasn’t good enough to be a chef. Deep in his bones, the former Dominic Baciagalupo-how he missed the Dominic!-was just a mill-town, logging-camp kind of cook.

Tony Molinari was a chef, the cook was thinking-Paul Polcari, too. Tony Angel had learned a lot from those two-more than Nunzi ever could have taught him-but the cook had also learned he would never be as good as Molinari or Paul.

“You have no feeling for fish, Gamba,” Molinari had told him as sympathetically as possible. It was true. There was only one fish dish on the menu at Avellino, and sometimes the only seafood of the day was a pasta dish-if the cook could get calamari. (He stewed it slowly for a long time, in a spicy marinara sauce with black olives and pine nuts.) But in Brattleboro, the calamari he could get generally came frozen, which was all right, and the most reliable fresh fish was sword-fish, which Tony Molinari had taught him to prepare with lemon and garlic and olive oil-either under the broiler or on a grill-with fresh rosemary, if the cook could get it, or with dried oregano.

He didn’t do dolci. It was Paul Polcari who’d gently made the point that the cook had no feeling for desserts, either-more to the point, Italian desserts, Tony Angel was thinking. What he did do well was the regular mill-town and logging-camp fare-pies and cobblers. (In Vermont, you couldn’t go wrong with blueberries and apples.) At Avellino, the cook served a fruit-and-cheese course, too; many of his regular customers preferred that to dessert.

The admiration of his very own restaurant had distracted Tony Angel from his thoughts about Ketchum’s politics, which he returned to while he made his gimpy way downhill to Avellino. When it came to what other people called progress-most engines, and machinery of all sorts-Ketchum was a bit of a Luddite. Not only did he miss the river drives; he claimed he’d liked logging better before there were chainsaws! (But Ketchum was overly fond of guns, the cook was thinking-guns were in a category of machinery the old woodsman would approve of.)

Neither a liberal nor a conservative, Ketchum could best be described as a libertarian-well, the logger was a libertine, too, Tony Angel considered, and (in the woodsman’s younger days) something of a rake and a profligate. Why was it that every time he thought of Ketchum, the cook couldn’t help thinking of the logger in sexual terms? (The former Dominic Baciagalupo knew why that was, of course; it just always depressed him when his thoughts about Ketchum went there.)

Ketchum had been furious when father and son and grandson all came back to Vermont from Iowa, but the Writers’ Workshop had been generous to let Danny teach there for as long as they did. They’d offered him only a two-year contract; Danny had asked to stay a third year, and they let him, but in the summer of ’75, when Joe was ten, the family returned to Windham County. Danny loved his old farmhouse in Putney. His father would have nothing to do with living there. The Vietnam War was over; Windham College ’s death throes were more apparent. Besides, Tony Angel had never liked Putney.

While neither Danny’s second nor third novel would make him any money, the cook had increased his savings in Iowa -enough to buy the old storefront space with the apartment above it on Brattleboro ’s Main Street. That was the year Avellino was born-when Danny was commuting to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was the closest college-teaching job that the writer could find, but the distinguished and somewhat staid women’s college was well over an hour’s drive (nearly two) from Putney-a long commute in the winter months, if it was snowing. Still, living in Putney mattered to Danny. No small part of it was his high opinion of the Grammar School-within walking distance of home-where Joe would finish the eighth grade before going off to Northfield Mount Hermon.

The cook was shaking his head as he limped into his restaurant, because he was thinking that Daniel truly must love living in the country. Tony Angel didn’t; the North End had made a city man out of him, or at least he was a neighborhood kind of guy. But not Daniel. He’d made the commute to that women’s college for three years, before The Kennedy Fathers was published in ’78; the novel’s success had freed him from ever having to teach again.

Of course there’d been more money suddenly, and the cook had worried-he still worried-about what effect it might have on young Joe. Daniel was old enough (thirty-six) when the bestseller business found him to not be affected by either the fame or the good fortune. But when Joe was only thirteen, the boy woke up one morning with a famous father. Couldn’t this have made an unwelcome mark on any kid that age? And then there were the women Daniel went through-both before and after he was famous.

The writer had been living with one of his former Windham College students when he, Tony, and Joe moved to Iowa City. The girl with a boy’s name-“It’s Franky, with a y,” she liked to say with a pout-hadn’t made the move with them.

Thank God for that, the cook thought at the time. Franky was a feral-looking little thing, a virtual wild animal.

“She wasn’t my student when I began to sleep with her,” Danny had argued with his dad. No, but Franky had been one of his writing students only a year or two before; she was one of many Windham College students who never seemed to leave Putney. They went to Windham, they graduated, or they quit school but continued to hang around-they wouldn’t leave.

The girl had dropped in on her former teacher one day, and she’d simply stayed.

“What does Franky do all day?” his dad had asked Danny.

“She’s trying to be a writer,” Danny said. “Franky likes hanging around, and she’s nice to Joe-he likes her.”

Franky did some housecleaning, and a little cooking-if you could call it that, the cook thought. The wild girl was barefoot most of the time-even in that drafty old farmhouse in the winter months, when Daniel heated the whole place with a couple of woodstoves. (Putney was the kind of town that worshipped woodstoves, Tony Angel had observed; there was even an alternative to heating in that town! The cook simply hated the place.)

Franky was a dirty-blonde with lank hair and a slouchy posture. She wore funny old-fashioned dresses of the kind the cook remembered Nunzi wearing, except Franky never wore a bra, and her underarms-what the cook saw of them-were unshaven. And Franky couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three when she’d lived with Daniel and little Joe. Daniel had just turned thirty when they went to Iowa.

There’d been more young women in the writer’s life in Iowa City, one of his workshop students among them, and while there was no one special now-nor had there been anyone long-lasting since Danny Angel became famous-Joe, by the time he was a teenager, had seen his dad with numerous young women. (And three or four notably older women, the cook was remembering; two of those ladies were among Daniel’s foreign publishers.)

The Putney property was a virtual compound these days. The writer had turned the old farmhouse into his guesthouse; he’d built a new house for himself and Joe, and there was a separate building where Danny did his writing. His “writing shack,” Daniel called it. Some shack! Tony Angel thought. The building was small, but it had a half-bathroom in it; there was also a phone, a TV, and a small fridge.

Danny may have liked living in the country, but he wasn’t exactly reclusive-hence the guesthouse. In his life as a writer, he’d gotten to know a number of city people, and they came to visit him-the occasional women included. Had Joe’s exposure to his famous father’s casual relationships with women made the teenager something of a playboy at prep school? Tony Angel wondered. He worried about his grandson-as much as, if not more than, the boy’s dad did. Yes, the eighteen-year-old’s drinking would bear watching, the cook knew. Joe had the mischievous insouciance of a boy who liked to party.

With the war in Vietnam, they would lower the drinking age in many states to eighteen, the logic being that if they could send mere boys off to die at that age, shouldn’t the kids at least be allowed to drink? After the war was over, the drinking age would go back up to twenty-one again-but not until 1984-though nowadays, Tony knew, many kids Joe’s age had fake I.D.’s. The cook saw them all the time at Avellino; he knew his grandson had one.

It was how Joe was more than fast with girls that really worried Tony Angel. Going too fast too soon with girls could get you in as much trouble as drinking, the former Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, knew. It had gotten the cook in trouble, in his opinion-and Daniel, too.

Despite Carmella’s best efforts, Tony knew all about her catching her niece Josie with Daniel; the cook was sure that his son had banged more than one of those DiMattia girls, and even a Saetta and a Calogero or two! But young Joe had at least seen, if not actually overheard, his father in a few more adult relationships than whatever foolishness Daniel had been up to with his kissing cousins. And his grandfather knew that Joe had spent more than a few nights in the girls’ dorms at NMH. (It was a wonder the boy hadn’t been caught and kicked out of school; now, in the spring term of his senior year, maybe he would be!) There were things Joe’s dad didn’t know, but his grandfather did.

In his frantic last night in Twisted River, the cook had prayed-for the first and only time, until now. Please, God, give me time, Tony Angel had prayed, long ago-seeing his twelve-year-old’s small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. (Daniel had been waiting in the passenger seat, as if he’d never lost faith that his father would safely return from leaving Injun Jane’s body at Carl’s.)

For all the talking the cook and Ketchum did about Danny Angel’s novels-not only about what was in them but, more important, what the writer seemed to be purposely leaving out-the one thing the men noticed without fail was how much the books were about what Danny feared. Maybe the imagination does that, Tony thought, as he peeked under the damp towels covering his pizza dough; the dough hadn’t risen enough for him to punch it down. Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The stories often indulged the nightmarish-namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril-in part, because they were young!

Tony Angel wasn’t much of a reader anymore-though he’d bought innumerable novels (on his son’s and Ketchum’s recommendations) at The Book Cellar. He’d read a lot of first chapters and had just stopped. Something about Ketchum’s relationship with Rosie had kicked the reading right out of the cook. The only novels he actually finished-and he read every word-were his son’s. Tony wasn’t like Ketchum, who’d read (or heard) everything.

The cook knew his son’s worst fears: Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply obsessed about that subject. That was where the writer’s fearful imagination came from-childhood terrors. The writer Danny Angel seemed driven to imagine the worst things that could happen in any given situation. In a way, as a writer-that is to say, in his imagination-the cook’s son (at forty-one) was still a child.

IN HIS QUIET KITCHEN, in his cherished Avellino, the cook prayed that he be allowed to live a little longer; he wanted to help his grandson survive being a teenager. Maybe boys aren’t out of the woods until their late twenties, Tony considered-after all, Daniel had been twenty-two when he married Katie. (Certainly that had been taking a risk!) What if Joe had to be thirty before he was safe? And if anything did happen to Joe, the cook prayed he would still be alive to look after Daniel; he knew how much help his son would need then.

Tony Angel looked at the silent radio; he almost turned it on, just to help him banish these morbid thoughts. He considered writing a letter to Ketchum instead of turning on the radio, but he didn’t do either of these things; he just kept praying. It seemed that the praying had come to him out of nowhere, and he wished he could stop doing it.

There in his kitchen, next to his cookbooks, were various editions of Danny Angel’s novels, which the cook kept in chronological order. There was no more revered place for those novels than among his dad’s cookbooks, Danny knew. But it didn’t calm the cook down to look at his famous son’s books.

After Family Life in Coos County, the cook knew that Daniel had published The Mickey, but was that in 1972 or ’73? The first novel had been dedicated to Mr. Leary, but the second one should have been, given its subject matter. As he’d more or less promised, however, Danny had dedicated his second novel to his dad. “For my father, Dominic Baciagalupo,” the dedication read, which was a little confusing, because the author’s name was Danny Angel-and Dominic was already called Tony, or Mr. Angel.

“Isn’t that sort of like letting the nom-de-plume cat out of the nom-de-plume bag?” Ketchum had complained, but it had turned out for the better. When Danny became famous for his fourth novel, the issue of him writing under a nom de plume had long been defused. Almost everyone in the literary world knew that Danny Angel was a nom de plume, but very few people remembered what his real name was-or they didn’t care. (Mr. Leary had been right to suggest that there were easier names to remember than Baciagalupo, and how many people-even in the literary world-know what John Le Carré’s real name is?)

Danny, not surprisingly, had defended his decision to Ketchum by saying that he doubted the deputy sheriff was very active in the literary world; even the logger had to acknowledge that the cowboy wasn’t a reader. Besides, very few people read The Mickey when it was originally published. When his fourth novel made Danny famous, and readers went back to the earlier books, that was when everyone read The Mickey.

A secondary but major character in The Mickey is a repressed Irishman who teaches English at the Michelangelo School; the novel focuses on the main character’s last encounter with his former English teacher at a striptease show in the Old Howard. To the cook, it seemed a slight coincidence to build a whole book around-the mutual shame and embarrassment of the former student (now an Exeter boy, with a bunch of his Exeter friends) and the character who was clearly modeled on Mr. Leary. Probably, the episode at the Old Howard had actually happened-or so the novelist’s father believed.

The third novel came along in ’75, just after they’d all moved back to Vermont from Iowa. The cook would wonder if his was the only family to have mistakenly assumed that “kissing cousins” meant cousins who were sexually interested in, or involved with, one another. Danny’s third novel was called Kissing Kin. (Originally, so-called kissing kin meant any distant kin who were familiar enough to be greeted with a kiss; it didn’t mean what Danny’s dad had always thought.)

The cook was relieved that his son’s third book wasn’t dedicated to Danny’s cousins in the Saetta and Calogero families, because the irony of such a dedication might not have been appreciated by the male members of those families. The story concerns a young boy’s sexual initiation in the North End; he is seduced by an older cousin who works as a waitress in the same restaurant where the boy has a part-time job as a busboy. The older cousin in the novel was clearly modeled, the cook knew, on that slut Elena Calogero-better said, the physical description of the character was true to Elena. Yet both Carmella and the cook were pretty sure that Daniel’s first sexual experience had been with Carmella’s niece Josie DiMattia.

The novel might have been pure fantasy, or wishful thinking, the cook supposed. But there were details that particularly bothered the writer’s dad-for example, how the older cousin breaks off the relationship with the young boy when he’s going off to boarding school. The waitress tells the kid that all along, she wanted to be fucking the boy’s father-not the boy. (Little is written about the character of the dad; he’s rather distantly described as the “new cook” in the restaurant where his son is a busboy.) The rejected boy goes off to school hating his father, because he imagines that the older cousin will eventually seduce his dad.

Surely this couldn’t be true-this was outrageous! Tony Angel was thinking, as he searched in the book for that passage where the train is pulling out of North Station, and the boy is looking out the window of the train at his father on the station platform. The boy suddenly can’t bear to look at his dad; his attention shifts to his stepmother. “I knew that the next time I saw her she would probably have put on a few more pounds,” Danny Angel wrote.

“How could you write that about Carmella?” the cook had yelled at his writer son when he’d first read that hurtful sentence.

“It’s not Carmella, Dad,” Daniel said. (Okay-maybe the character of the stepmother in Kissing Kin wasn’t Carmella, but Danny Angel dedicated the novel to her.)

“I suppose it’s just tough luck being in a writer’s family,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I mean, we get mad if Danny writes about us, or someone we know, but we also get mad at him for not writing about us, or for not really writing about himself-his true self, I mean. Not to mention that he made his damn ex-wife a better person than she ever was!”

All that was true, the cook thought. Somehow what struck him about Daniel’s fiction was that it was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time. (Danny disagreed, of course. After his schoolboy attempts at fiction writing, which he’d shown only to Mr. Leary-and those stories were nothing but a confusing mix of memoir and fantasy, both exaggerated, and nearly as “confusing” to Danny as they were to the late Michael Leary-the young novelist had not really been autobiographical at all, not in his opinion.)

The cook couldn’t find the passage he was searching for in Kissing Kin. He put his son’s third novel back on the bookshelf, his eyes passing quickly over the fourth one-“the fame-maker,” Ketchum called it. Tony Angel didn’t even like to look at The Kennedy Fathers-the one with the fake Katie in it, as he thought of it. The novel had not only made his son famous; it was an international bestseller and the first one of Daniel’s books to be made into a movie.

Almost everyone said that it wasn’t a bad movie, though it was not nearly as successful as the novel. Danny didn’t like the film, but he said he didn’t hate it, either; he just wanted nothing to do with the moviemaking process. He said that he never wanted to write a screenplay, and that he wouldn’t sell the film rights to any of his other novels-unless someone wrote a halfway decent adaptation first, and Danny got to read the screenplay before he sold the movie rights to the novel.

The writer had explained to his dad that this was not the way the movie business worked; generally speaking, the rights to make a film from a novel were sold before a screenwriter was even attached to the project. By demanding to see a finished screenplay before he would consider selling the rights to his novel, Danny Angel was pretty much assuring himself that no one would ever make another movie of one of his books-not while he was alive, anyway.

“I guess Danny did hate the movie of The Kennedy Fathers, after all,” Ketchum had said to the cook.

But the logger and the author’s dad had to be careful what they said about The Kennedy Fathers around young Joe. Danny had dedicated the novel to his son. Ketchum and the cook were at least pleased to see that the book wasn’t dedicated to Katie. Naturally, Danny was aware that the two old friends weren’t exactly fans of his famous fourth novel.

It was only natural, one of Daniel’s publishers had told the cook-she was one of the foreign ones, one of the older women the writer had slept with-that whatever novel Danny Angel wrote after The Kennedy Fathers was going to get criticized for not living up to the breakthrough book and runaway bestseller that the famous fourth novel was. Even so, Danny didn’t help himself by writing a fifth novel that was both dense and sexually disturbing. And, as more than one critic wrote, the writer loved semicolons to excess; he’d even put one in the title!

It was simply stupid, that title-The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt, Daniel had called it. “Constipated Christ!” Ketchum had shouted at the bestselling author. “Couldn’t you have called it one thing or the other?”

In interviews, Danny always said that the title reflected the old-fashioned nineteenth-century kind of story that the novel was. “Bullshit,” the cook had said to his son. “That title makes you look like you can’t make up your mind.”

“Whatever you call them, they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma,” Ketchum said to Danny, about all the semicolons. “The only writing I do are letters to you and your dad, but I’ve written rather a lot of them, and in all those letters, I don’t believe I’ve ever used as many of those damn things as you use on any one fucking page of this novel.”

“They’re called semicolons, Ketchum,” the writer said.

“I don’t care what they’re called, Danny,” the old woodsman said. “I’m just telling you that you use too damn many of them!”

But of course what really pissed off Ketchum and the cook about Danny Angel’s fifth novel was the fucking dedication-“Katie, in memoriam.”

All Tony Angel could say about it to Ketchum was: “That Callahan cunt broke my son’s heart and abandoned my grandson.” (It was not a good time, Ketchum knew, to point out to his old friend that she’d also kept his son out of the war and had given him the grandson.)

Not to mention what The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt was about, the cook was thinking, as he looked with suspicion at the novel on his kitchen bookshelf. It’s another North End story, but this time the boy who is coming of age is sexually initiated by one of his aunts-not an older cousin-and the maiden aunt and spinster is a dead ringer for Rosie’s youngest sister, the unfortunate Filomena Calogero!

Surely this hadn’t happened! the cook hoped, but had Daniel once wished that it had-or had it almost happened? Once again (as in any Danny Angel novel) the graphic detail was quite convincing, and the sexual descriptions of the boy’s petite aunt-she was such a pathetic, self-pitying woman!-were painful for the cook, though he’d read every word.

Critics also made the point that “the perhaps overrated writer” was “repeating himself;” Daniel had been thirty-nine when his fifth novel was published in 1981, and all the criticism must have stung him, though you wouldn’t know it. If the cousin in Kissing Kin tells the boy she’s breaking up with that she always wanted to sleep with his father instead, in the novel about the neurotic aunt, she tells the boy that she imagines she’s having sex with his father whenever she has sex with the son! (What manifestation of self-torture is this? the cook had wondered, when he’d first read The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt.)

Maybe it did happen, the man who missed the Dominic in himself now imagined. He’d always thought that Rosie’s sister Filomena was completely crazy. He couldn’t look at her without feeling she was a grotesque mask of Rosie-“a Rosie imposter,” he’d once described her to Ketchum. But Daniel had seemed improbably infatuated with Filomena; the boy couldn’t stop himself from staring at her, and it was not as an aunt that he appeared to be regarding her. Had the flighty Filomena, who was still miserable and unmarried (or so the cook assumed), actually accepted or even encouraged her smitten young nephew’s adoration?

“Why don’t you just ask Danny if the crazy aunt popped his cherry?” Ketchum had inquired of the cook. That was a vulgar Coos County expression, and the cook hated it. (If he’d paid closer attention to the conversations around him in Boston, the cook might have realized that “cherry-popping” was a vulgar North End expression, too.)

There was one part of The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt that both Tony Angel and Ketchum had loved: the wedding at the end. The boy has grown up and he’s marrying his college sweetheart-an indifferent bride, if you ever met one, and closer to a real-life Katie character than Caitlin in The Kennedy Fathers ever was. Also, Danny had nailed those ice-cube-sucking Callahan men dead between their eyes-those tight-assed patrician Republicans who, Danny believed, had made Katie the anarchist rule-breaker she was. She was a trust-fund kid who’d reinvented herself as a radical, but she’d been a faux revolutionary. Katie’s only revolution had been a small, sexual one.

THERE WAS ONE BOOK Danny Angel had written that was not on the kitchen bookshelf in Avellino. That was his sixth novel, which had not yet been published. But the cook had almost finished reading it. A copy of the galleys was upstairs in Tony Angel’s bedroom. Ketchum also had a copy. Both men felt ambivalent about the novel, and neither was in any hurry to finish it.

East of Bangor was set in an orphanage in Maine in the 1960s-when abortion was still illegal. Virtually the same damn boy from those earlier Danny Angel novels-a boy from Boston who ends up going away to boarding school-gets two of his North End cousins pregnant, one when he’s still a student at Exeter (before he’s learned to drive) and the second after he’s gone off to college. He goes to the University of New Hampshire, naturally.

There’s an old midwife in the Maine orphanage who performs abortions-a deeply sympathetic woman who struck the cook as being modeled on the unlikely fusion of sweet, gentle Paul Polcari (“the fucking pacifist!” as Ketchum insisted on calling him) and Injun Jane.

The first cousin who goes off to Maine has the baby and leaves it behind; she is so devastated by having a child and not knowing what has become of it that she tells the other pregnant cousin not to do what she did. The second pregnant cousin also goes to Maine -to the very same orphanage, but to have an abortion. The problem is that the old midwife might not live long enough to perform the procedure. If the young midwife-in-training ends up doing the D & C, the cousin might suffer the consequences. The young midwife doesn’t know enough about what she’s doing.

Both Ketchum and the cook were hoping that the novel was going to turn out well, and that nothing too bad would happen to the second pregnant cousin. But, knowing Danny Angel’s novels, the two old readers had their fears-and something else was worrying them.

Over a year ago, Joe had gotten a girl in trouble at Northfield Mount Hermon. Because his father was famous-for a writer, Danny Angel was very recognizable-and because Joe already knew something about the subject of the novel his dad was writing, the boy hadn’t asked for his father’s help. Those anti-abortion people picketed most clinics or doctors’ offices where you could get an abortion; Joe didn’t want his dad taking him and the unfortunate girl to one of those places where the protesters were. What if some so-called right-to-lifer recognized his famous father?

“Smart boy,” Ketchum said to Joe, when Danny’s son had written him. Young Joe hadn’t wanted to tell his grandfather, either, but Ketchum insisted that the cook come along with them.

They’d driven to an abortion clinic in Vermont together. Ketchum and the cook sat up front, in the cook’s car; Joe and the sad, frightened girl were in the backseat. It had been an awkward situation because the couple were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend. They’d broken up almost a month before the girl discovered she was pregnant, but they both knew Joe was the baby’s father; they were doing the right thing (in the cook and Ketchum’s opinion), but it was difficult for them.

Ketchum tried to console them, but-Ketchum being Ketchum-it came out a little clumsily. The logger said more than he meant to. “There’s one thing to be happy about,” he told the miserable-looking couple in the backseat. “When the same thing happened to your dad and a girl he knew, Joe, abortion wasn’t legal-and it wasn’t necessarily safe.”

Had the old woodsman forgotten the cook was in the car?

“So that’s why you took Danny and that DiMattia girl to Maine !” Tony Angel cried. “I always thought so! You said you wanted to show them the Kennebec -’the last great river-driving river,’ you called it, or some such bullshit. But that DiMattia girl was so dumb-she told Carmella you’d driven her and Danny somewhere east of Bangor. I knew Bangor was nowhere near the Kennebec!”

Ketchum and the cook had argued the whole way to the abortion clinic, where there’d been picketers; Joe had been right not to involve his famous father with the protesters. And all the way home-the ex-girlfriend and Joe were spending the weekend in Brattleboro with the boy’s grandfather-Joe had held the girl in the backseat, where she sobbed and sobbed. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen-seventeen, tops. “You’re going to be all right,” Joe, who was not yet seventeen, kept saying to the poor kid. Ketchum and the cook hoped so.

And now the two older men had stopped themselves in the last chapter of East of Bangor -Danny Angel’s abortion novel, as it would be called. The cook could see that there was something of Ketchum in the character who drove the boy (and his first pregnant cousin) to Maine. By the description, the friendly older man also reminded the cook of Tony Molinari; Danny Angel calls him the principal chef in the North End restaurant where the two pregnant cousins work as waitresses. It’s the way the man handles the truck they drive to Maine in-that was what led Tony Angel to see the so-called chef as “the Ketchum character.” The Molinari likeness was a disguise Danny gave to the character, because of course the writer didn’t know, when he was finishing the final draft of his abortion novel, that Ketchum had already told his dad about Danny getting the DiMattia girl pregnant-and how the logger drove the two of them to an orphanage somewhere east of Bangor, Maine.

The book was dedicated to those two chefs Danny Angel and his dad both loved, Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari-“Un abbràccio for Tony M. and Paul P.,” the author had written, allowing the two men some measure of privacy. (“An embrace” for them from the former busboy/waiter/substitute pizza and sous chef in Vicino di Napoli.) Both those chefs, the cook knew, were retired; Vicino di Napoli was gone, and another restaurant with another name had taken its place in North Square.

Tony Angel still drove periodically to the North End to do a little shopping. He would meet Molinari and Paul at the Caffè Vittoria for some espresso. They always assured him that Carmella was doing well; she seemed reasonably content with another fella. It came as no surprise to the cook that Carmella would end up with someone; she was both beautiful and lovable.

East of Bangor might be a difficult novel for young Joe to read, whenever he got around to it; Joe had no time to read his father’s novels when he was at Northfield Mount Hermon. To the cook’s knowledge, his grandson had read only one of his dad’s books: The Kennedy Fathers, of course-if only in the hope he would learn a little about what his mother had been like. (Given Ketchum’s opinion of the Katie character, what young Joe would learn about his mother from that novel “wasn’t worth a pinch of coon shit”-according to the logger.)

WELL, HERE I AM-back to worrying about young Joe again, and all that that leads to-the cook was thinking. He looked under the damp dish towels covering his pizza dough; the dough was ready to punch down, which the cook did. Tony Angel wet the dishcloths once more; he wrung them only partially dry before re-covering the bowls for his pizza dough’s second rise.

He thought his next letter to Ketchum might begin, “There’s so much to worry about, I can’t seem to stop myself from doing it. And you’d laugh at me, Ketchum, because I’ve even been praying!” But the cook didn’t begin that letter. He felt strangely exhausted, and he’d shot the whole morning doing almost nothing-just starting his pizza dough and limping to the bookstore and back. It was already time to go shopping. Avellino wasn’t open for lunch-just dinner. Tony Angel shopped at midday; his staff showed up in the early afternoon.

As for worrying, the cook wasn’t alone; Danny worried a lot, too. And neither of them was as worried as Ketchum, even though it was almost June-way past mud season in southern Vermont, and they’d been mud-free for several weeks in northern New Hampshire. Ketchum had been known to feel almost exhilarated in those first few weeks after mud season had passed. But not now, and truly not since the cook had come back to Vermont from Iowa with his son and grandson. Ketchum didn’t like them to be anywhere near New Hampshire-particularly not his old friend with the new and hard-to-get-used-to name.

The funny thing was that the cook, for all his worrying, didn’t give the slightest thought to that. So much time had passed; it had been sixteen years since he’d moved out of Boston, and twenty-nine since his last, eventful night in Twisted River. Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, who was now Tony Angel, wasn’t as worried about an angry old cowboy in Coos County as he was about other things.

The cook should have been more worried about Carl, because Ketchum was right. Vermont was next door to New Hampshire -too close for comfort. And the deputy sheriff, who was sixty-six, had retired; he had lots of time on his hands, and that cowboy was still looking for the little cripple who’d stolen his Injun Jane.

CHAPTER 8. DEAD DOG; REMEMBERING MAO’S

FROM THE FAMOUS WRITER’S “COMPOUND”-AS THE PUTNEY locals (and the writer’s own father) were inclined to call it- Hickory Ridge Road climbed for over a mile, the road both crossing the brook and running parallel to the water. The so-called back road from Putney to Westminster West was dirt, and at a point less than midway between Danny Angel’s property in Putney and his best friend’s house in Westminster West, there was quite a pretty farm, with horses, at the end of a long, steep driveway. In the warm weather-after he’d opened his swimming pool in May, and before he winterized the pool every October-Danny called his friend in Westminster West and told him when he was starting out on a run. It was four or five miles, maybe six or seven; Danny was such a daydreamer that he didn’t keep track of the distance of his runs anymore.

The pretty farm at the end of the long, uphill driveway seemed to focus the writer’s reveries, because an older woman with snow-white hair (and the body of a dancer in her twenties) lived there. Danny had had an affair with her some years ago-her name was Barrett. She wasn’t married, and hadn’t been at the time; there was no scandal attached to their relationship. Nevertheless, in the writer’s imagination-at about the two-mile mark of his run-Danny always foresaw his own murder at the place where this woman’s steep driveway met the road. He would be running on the road, just a half-second past her driveway, and Barrett would come gliding down the hill, her car coasting in neutral, with the engine off, so that by the time he heard her tires scattering the loose gravel on the road, it would be too late for him to get out of the almost-silent car’s path.

A spectacular way for a storyteller to die, Danny had imagined-a vehicular homicide, with the famous novelist’s ex-lover at the wheel of the murder weapon!

That Barrett had no such designs on ending the writer’s life didn’t matter; it would have been a good story. In fact, she’d had many affairs, and (in Danny’s estimation) Barrett harbored no homicidal feelings for her ex-lovers; the writer doubted that Barrett would go out of her way to run over any of them. She was exclusively focused on caring for her horses and maintaining her youthful physique.

When there was a conceivably interesting movie playing at the Latchis in Brattleboro, Danny would often ask Barrett to see the film with him, and they would have dinner at Avellino. That Barrett was much closer in age to Danny’s dad than she was to Danny had provided the cook with grounds for complaining to his writer son. Nowadays, Danny frequently found it necessary to remind his father that he and Barrett were “just friends.”

Danny could run five or six miles at a pace of seven minutes per mile, usually running the last mile in closer to six minutes. At forty-one, he’d had no injuries and was still slight of build; at five feet seven, he weighed only 145 pounds. (His dad was a little smaller, and perhaps the limp made him seem shorter than he was.) Because of the occasional bad dog on the back road to Westminster West, Danny ran with a couple of sawed-off squash racquets-just the handles. If a dog attacked him when he was running, Danny would stick one of the racquet handles in the dog’s face-until the dog chomped on it. Then, with the other sawed-off handle, he would hit the dog-usually on the bridge of the nose.

Danny didn’t play squash. His friend in Westminster West was the squash player. When Armando DeSimone broke one of his racquets, he gave it to Danny, who sawed off the racquet head and kept the handle. Armando had grown up in the North End about a decade before Danny and his dad moved there; like the cook, Armando still drove to his beloved Boston, periodically, to shop. Armando and Danny enjoyed cooking for each other. They’d been colleagues in the English department at Windham, and when the college folded, Armando took a job teaching at the Putney School. His wife, Mary, had been Joe’s English and history teacher at the Grammar School.

When Danny Angel became rich and famous, he lost a few of the old friends he’d had, but not the DeSimones. Armando had read all but the first of Danny Angel’s novels in manuscript. For five out of six novels, he’d been Danny’s earliest reader. You don’t lose a friend like that.

Armando had built a squash court in an old barn on his Westminster West property; he talked about building a swimming pool next, but in the meantime he and Mary swam in Danny’s pool. Nearly every afternoon, when it wasn’t raining, the writer would run to the DeSimones’ house in Westminster West; then Armando and Mary would drive Danny back to Putney, and they’d all swim in the pool. Danny would make drinks for them and serve the drinks at the pool after they swam.

Danny had stopped drinking sixteen years ago-long enough so that he had no problem having alcohol in his house, or fixing drinks for his friends. And he wouldn’t dream of having a dinner party and not serving wine, though he could remember that when he’d first stopped drinking, he was unable to be around people who were drinking anything alcoholic. At the time, in Iowa City, that had been a problem.

As for the writer’s second life in Iowa City, with his dad and little Joe-well, that had been a peaceful interlude, for the most part, except for the unwelcome reminders of Danny’s earlier time in that town with Katie. In retrospect, Danny thought, those last three years in Iowa -in the early seventies, when Joe had been in the second, third, and fourth grades, and the greatest danger the boy faced was what might happen to him on his bicycle-seemed almost blissful. Iowa City had been safe in those years.

Joe was seven when he’d gone back to Iowa with his dad and grandfather, and was still only ten when they’d returned to Vermont. Maybe those ages were the safest ages, the writer was imagining as he ran; possibly, Iowa City had had nothing to do with it.

CHILDHOOD, AND HOW IT FORMS YOU-moreover, how your child hood is relived in your life as an adult-that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed as he ran. From the age of twelve, he had become afraid for his father; the cook was still a hunted man. Like his dad, but for different reasons, Danny had been a young father-in reality, he’d also been a single parent (even before Katie left him). Now, at forty-one, Danny was more afraid for young Joe than he was for his dad.

Maybe it was more than the Katie Callahan gene that put Joe at risk; nor did Danny necessarily believe that the source of the wildness in his son was the boy’s free-spirited grandmother, that daring woman who’d courted disaster on the late-winter ice of Twisted River. No, when Danny looked at young Joe at eighteen, it was himself at that dangerous age he saw. From all they’d read into (and had misread in) Danny Angel’s novels, the cook and Ketchum couldn’t have fathomed the perilous configuration of the various bullets Danny had dodged-not only in his life with Katie, but long before her.

It hadn’t been Josie DiMattia who’d sexually initiated Danny at the age of fifteen, before he went off to Exeter; furthermore, Carmella may have caught them at it, but Josie wasn’t the one who got pregnant. Ketchum had indeed driven Danny to that orphanage with the obliging midwife in Maine, but with the oldest DiMattia girl, Teresa. (Perhaps Teresa had given so many condoms to her younger sisters that she’d forgotten to save some for herself.) And neither Teresa nor Danny’s equally older cousin Elena Calogero had provided Danny with his first sexual experience-though the boy was much more attracted to those older girls than he was to any girl his own age, including Josie, who’d been only a little older. There’d also been an older Saetta cousin, Giuseppina, who’d seduced young Dan, but Giuseppina wasn’t his first seducer.

No, indeed-that instructive and most formative experience had been with the boy’s aunt Filomena, his mother’s youngest sister, when Danny had been only fourteen. Had Filomena been in her late twenties, or might she already have turned thirty when the assignations with her young nephew began? Danny was wondering as he approached the final two miles of his run.

It was still May; the blackflies were bad, but not at the pace he was running, which he began to pick up. As he ran, he could hear his heart and his own breathing, though these elevated functions didn’t seem to Danny as loud or urgent as the beating of his heart or his gasps for breath whenever the boy had been with his insane aunt Filomena. What had she been thinking? It was Danny’s dad she’d adored, and the cook wouldn’t look at her. Had the way her nephew doted on her-Danny couldn’t take his eyes off her-seemed a sufficient consolation prize to Filomena?

She’d been only the second woman in the Saetta and Calogero clans to attend college, but Filomena had shared another distinction with her older sister Rosie-namely, a certain lawlessness with men. Filomena might have been only a preteen-at most, thirteen or fourteen-when Rosie had been sent away to the north country. She’d loved Rosie, and had looked up to her-only to see her disgraced, and displayed as a bad example to the younger girls in the family. Filomena had been sent to Sacred Heart, an all-girls’ Catholic school near the Paul Revere House on North Square. She’d been kept as safe from boys as was humanly and spiritually possible.

As Danny Angel picked up the pace in his long run, he considered that this might have been why his aunt Filomena had been more interested in him, a boy, than she appeared to be interested in men. (Her sacred sister’s widower excluded-yet Filomena must have known that the cook was a closed door to her, an unfulfilled fantasy, whereas Danny, who had not yet started to shave, had his father’s long eyelashes and his mother’s fair, almost fragile skin.) And it must have made an impression on Filomena that, at fourteen, the boy worshipped his small, pretty aunt. According to Danny’s dad, Filomena’s eyes weren’t the same lethal blue as Rosie’s, but his aunt’s eyes, and all the rest of her, were dangerous enough to do Danny some long-lasting harm. For one thing, Filomena managed to make all girls Danny’s age uninteresting to him-that is, until he met Katie.

The cook and Ketchum had jumped to the conclusion that young Daniel had seen something of his mother in Katie. What the boy had seen, perhaps, was that combination of a repressed girlhood in an angry young woman of wanton self-destructiveness; Katie had been a younger, more political version of his aunt Filomena. The difference between them was that Filomena had been devoted to the boy, and her sexual efforts to outdo the mere girls in Danny’s life were entirely successful. Denied any demonstrable expression of her sexuality as a girl, Filomena (in her late twenties, and well into her thirties) was a woman possessed. By the time Danny met her, Katie Callahan was almost indifferent to sex; that she’d had a lot of sex didn’t mean that she actually liked it. By the time Danny met her, Katie already thought of sex as a way of negotiating.

In Danny’s prep-school years, his aunt Filomena would book a room at the Exeter Inn almost every weekend. The boy’s trysts in that musty brick building were the unparalleled pleasures of his life at Exeter, and a contributing reason why he spent so few of his Exeter weekends at home in the North End. Carmella and the cook always worked hardest at Vicino di Napoli on Friday and Saturday nights, while the boy banged his youthful aunt-often in a Colonial four-poster bed, beneath a gauzy-white canopy. (He was a runner; runners have stamina.) With Filomena’s considerable and licentious assistance, Danny had achieved an adult independence-from both his actual and his Exeter families.

How could the boy possibly have had any interest in Exeter ’s dances with various girls’ schools? How could a closely chaperoned and chaste hug on the dance floor ever compete with the ardent, sweat-slicked contact he’d maintained with Filomena on an almost weekly basis-not only throughout his Exeter years but including Danny’s first two years of college in Durham?

And all the while, those Calogeros and Saettas took pity on “poor” Filomena; pretty as she was, she struck them as an eternal wallflower, both a maiden aunt and a spinster-in-the-making. Little did they know that, for seven hungry years, the woman was indulging the ceaseless sexual appetites of a teenage boy on his way to becoming a young man. In those seven years that his aunt Filomena dominated Danny’s sexual life, she more than made up for lost time. That she was a teacher at Sacred Heart-in the same Catholic and all-girls’ environment where the younger Filomena had been held down-was a perfect disguise.

All those other Calogeros, and the Saettas, thought of Filomena as “pathetic”-those were his father’s very words for her, Danny remembered, as he ran harder and harder. Outwardly, Filomena had seemed the picture of propriety and Catholic repression, but-oh!-not when she shed her clothes!

“Let’s just say I keep them busy at confession,” she told her spellbound nephew, for whom Filomena had set a standard; the young women who followed Filomena in Danny’s life couldn’t match his aunt’s erotic performance.

Filomena was in her mid-to late thirties-too old to have a baby, in her estimation-when the issue of Danny going to Vietnam (or not) was raised. She might have been happier with Ketchum’s solution; if Danny had lost a finger or two, he might have stayed with his aunt a little longer. Filomena was insane, but she was no fool; she knew she wouldn’t get to keep her beloved young Dan forever. She liked the sound of Katie Callahan’s idea better than she ever warmed to Ketchum’s plan-after all, in her own odd way, Filomena loved her nephew, and she had not met Katie.

Had Filomena met that most vulgar young woman, she might have opted for Ketchum’s Browning knife instead, but ultimately that decision wasn’t hers. Filomena felt fortunate to have captured such a vital young man’s almost complete attention for the seven years she’d held him in her thrall. Danny’s dalliances with those DiMattia girls, or several of his kissing cousins, didn’t bother her. Filomena knew that Danny would always come back to her, with renewed vigor. Those clumsy sluts couldn’t hold a candle to her-not in the boy’s fond estimation, anyway. Nor would Katie ever become the younger Filomena Danny may have desired-or, once upon a time, wished her to be.

Filomena would be in her mid-to late fifties now, the writer knew-running harder. Filomena had never married; she was no longer at Sacred Heart, but she was still teaching. His novel with the semicolon in the title-the one everyone had scorned (The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt)-had received one favorable review, which the writer Danny Angel appreciated.

In her letter, Filomena wrote: “I warmly enjoyed your novel, as you no doubt intended-a generous amount of homage with a justifiable measure of condemnation. Yes, I took advantage of you-if only in the beginning. That you stayed with me so long made me proud of myself, as I am proud of you now. And I’m sorry if, for a time, I made it hard for you to appreciate those inexperienced girls. But you must learn to choose more wisely, my dear-now that you’re a little older than I was when we went our separate ways.”

She’d written that letter two years ago-The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt had been published in ’81. He’d often thought of seeing her again, but how could Danny revisit Filomena without having unrealistic expectations? A man in his early forties, his unmarried aunt in her mid-to late fifties-well, what sort of relationship could exist between them now?

Nor had he learned to choose more wisely, as Filomena had recommended; perhaps he’d purposely decided against choosing to be with anyone who so much as hinted at the promise of permanence. And the writer knew he was too old to still hold his aunt accountable for introducing him to sex when he was too young. Whatever reluctance Danny felt for involving himself in a permanent relationship couldn’t be blamed on Filomena-certainly not anymore.

IT WAS THE BAD-DOG PART of Danny’s run; if there was going to be trouble, it would happen here. Danny was looking for the different-eyed dog in the narrow, flat driveway lined with abandoned vehicles-dead cars, some minus tires, trucks without engines, a motorcycle on its side and missing its handlebars-when the big male dog emerged from a Volkswagen bus without any doors. A husky-shepherd mix, he came into the road on a dead run-no bark, not a growl, all business. The patter of the pads of his paws on the dirt road was the only sound the dog made; he hadn’t yet begun to breathe hard.

Danny had had to beat him off with the squash-racquet handles before, and he’d had words with the animal’s no-less-aggressive owner-a young man in his twenties, possibly one of those former Windham College students who wouldn’t move away. The guy had a hippie appearance but was no pacifist; he might have been one of the countless young men living in the Putney area who called themselves “carpenters.” (If so, he was a carpenter who either didn’t work or was always at home.)

“Mind your dog!” Danny had called up the driveway to him, that previous time.

“Fuck you! Run somewhere else!” the hippie carpenter had yelled back.

Now here was the unchained dog again, snapping at the runner. Danny moved to the far-right side of the road and tried to outrun the dog, but the husky-shepherd quickly gained on him. Danny stopped diagonally across the road from the hippie carpenter’s driveway, and the dog stopped, too-circling him, his head low to the ground, his teeth bared. When the dog lunged at his thigh, Danny jabbed him in the ear with one of the sawed-off squash racquets; when the husky-shepherd seized the racquet handle in his teeth, Danny hit the animal as hard as he could with the other handle, both on the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. (One of his eyes was the light-blue color of a Siberian husky’s eyes, and the other was the dark-brown, more penetrating eye of a German shepherd.) The dog yelped and let go of the first racquet handle. Danny hit him on one ear, then the other, as the animal momentarily retreated.

“Leave my dog alone, you son of a bitch!” the hippie carpenter yelled. He was walking down his driveway between the rows of wrecked vehicles.

“Mind your dog,” was all Danny told him. He had started to run again before he saw the second dog-so similar-looking to the first that Danny thought, for a moment, it was the same dog. Then, suddenly, he had two dogs snapping at him; the second one was always at his back. “Call your dogs!” Danny shouted to the hippie carpenter.

“Fuck you. Run somewhere else,” the guy said. He was walking back up his driveway; he didn’t care if his dogs bit Danny, or not. The dogs tried hard to bite him, but Danny managed to jam one of the racquet handles deep down the throat of the first dog, and a lucky backhand swing caught the second dog in the face-lashing one of its eyes, as it was about to bite Danny in the calf. He kicked the dog choking on the squash-racquet handle in the throat. As the dog turned to run, Danny struck him behind one ear; the dog fell but quickly got up again. The second dog was slinking away. The hippie carpenter was nowhere to be seen, now that his dogs drew back to their territory in the driveway.

When Danny had first moved to Windham County, there’d been a bad dog on the back road between Dummerston and the Putney School. Danny had called the state police; it was a similar hostile-dog-owner situation. A state trooper had driven out there, just to talk to the dog owner, and when the dog attacked the trooper, he’d shot it dead-right in the driveway. “What did you say to the dog owner?” Danny had asked the trooper. (His name was Jimmy; they’d since become friends.)

“I told him to mind his dog,” Jimmy had answered.

Danny had been saying that ever since, but with less authority than a state trooper-clearly. Now, without further incident, he ran to the DeSimones’ house, but Danny didn’t like it when he’d had to break the pace he’d picked up in his last couple of miles. He told Armando about the two dogs and the hippie carpenter. “Call your friend Jimmy,” Armando said, but Danny explained that the state trooper would probably be forced to shoot both dogs.

“Why don’t we kill just one of them?” Armando suggested. “Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea.”

“That seems harsh,” Danny said. He’d understood what Armando’s proposed method of killing one of the husky-shepherds would entail. The DeSimones’ dog was a purebred German shepherd male named Rooster. Even as a puppy, Rooster had stuck out his chest and strutted, stiff-legged and threatening, in the presence of other male dogs-hence his name. But Rooster hadn’t been bluffing. Full-grown, he was a dog-killer-Rooster hated other male dogs. At least one of the dogs who’d attacked Danny was a male; the writer couldn’t be sure about the second dog, because it had come at him from behind.

Armando DeSimone was more than what amounted to Danny Angel’s only “literary” friend in Putney; Armando was a real reader, and he and Danny argued about what they read in a reasonably constructive way. But there was something innately confrontational in Armando, who reminded Danny of a more civilized version of Ketchum.

Danny had a tendency to avoid confrontation, which he often regretted. People who picked an argument or a fight with the writer got the idea that he would never fight back; they were surprised, or their feelings were hurt, when Danny did come back at them-though not until the third or fourth provocation. What Danny had learned was that these people who’d grown used to baiting or goading him were always indignant to discover that the writer had been keeping score.

Armando didn’t keep score. When attacked, he attacked back-the first time. Danny believed this was healthier-for a writer, especially-but it was not in his nature to be like Armando. In the disturbing case of the undisciplined dogs, it was only because he believed Armando’s way was better that Danny Angel allowed himself to be persuaded. (“Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea,” Armando had reasoned.)

The only way that would happen, the writer should have known, was if Rooster bit the hippie carpenter. Yet Rooster wasn’t wired that way; Rooster never bit people.

“Just one dog, Armando-you promise,” his wife, Mary, said, when they were all in the car with Rooster, driving back to Danny’s house.

“Tell Rooster-make him promise,” Armando said; he’d been a boxer, back when colleges and universities had boxing teams. Armando drove, with Danny up front in the passenger seat of the VW Beetle. Seemingly long-suffering Mary sat in the back with the panting German shepherd. Mary often seemed at odds with, or put out by, her husband’s combativeness, but Danny knew that Armando and Mary were a formidable couple-at heart, they were unassailably supportive of each other. Maybe Mary was more like Armando than Armando. Danny remembered her remark when a fellow teacher had been fired-a former colleague of Mary’s at the Grammar School, and later of Armando’s at the Putney School.

“Because justice is so rare, it’s such a delight,” Mary had remarked. (Now, Danny wondered, did Mary only seem to disapprove of her husband appointing Rooster as executioner?)

In the end, Danny Angel could only have said (in his own defense) that he did not acquiesce to the assassination of the dog-even a dog who’d attacked him-lightly. Yet, somehow, whenever Armando was involved-on matters of moral authority, especially-Danny did acquiesce.

“Oh, you mean this asshole,” Armando said, when Danny indicated the driveway with the dead cars.

“You know him?” Danny asked.

“You know him!” Armando said. “I’m sure he was one of your students.”

“At Windham?”

“Of course at Windham,” Armando said.

“I didn’t recognize him. I don’t think he was ever a student of mine,” Danny told his friend.

“Do you remember all your mediocre students, Danny?” Mary asked him.

“He’s just another hippie carpenter-or noncarpenter, as the case may be,” Danny said, but (even to himself) he didn’t sound too sure about it.

“Perhaps he’s a writer carpenter,” Armando suggested. Danny hadn’t considered that the young man might have known who Danny Angel was. There were almost as many would-be writers in Putney as there were hippies calling themselves carpenters. (The animosity, or envy, you encountered as a writer in Vermont was often of a back-road mentality.)

A HUSKY-SHEPHERD MIX is generally no match for a purebred German shepherd, but there were two of them. Then again, maybe no two dogs were ever a match for Rooster. Danny got out of the VW and pulled his seat-back out of the way to let Rooster out of the rear of the car. The German shepherd had hardly touched the ground with his forepaws when the two mixed breeds attacked him. Danny just got back in the Volkswagen and watched. Rooster killed one dog so quickly that neither Danny nor the DeSimones could ascertain if the second dog was male or female; it had crawled under the VW Beetle, where Rooster couldn’t get it. (The German shepherd had seized the first dog by the throat, and had snapped his neck with a couple of shakes.)

Armando called Rooster, and Danny let the German shepherd back into the Beetle. The hippie or writer carpenter had come out of his house and was staring at his dead dog; he hadn’t yet figured out that his other dog was cringing under the little car. “Mind your dog,” Danny said to him-as Armando slowly backed up, over the remaining husky-shepherd mix. There was just a bump when one of the front wheels rolled over the dog, and a corresponding grunt from the dog. The shepherd-husky got up stiffly and shook itself; it was another male, Danny could see. He saw the dog walk over to his dead mate, sniffing the body while the asshole hippie watched the Volkswagen Beetle back out of his driveway. But was this what Mary (or Armando) meant by “justice”? Maybe calling Jimmy would have been a better idea, Danny thought-even if the state trooper had wound up killing both dogs. It was the dog owner someone should have shot and killed, the writer believed; that would have been a better story.

THERE ARE THINGS I’LL MISS about Vermont, if I ever have to leave, Danny Angel was thinking, but most of all he would miss Armando and Mary DeSimone. He admired their certainty.

As the three friends swam in the pool at Danny’s Putney property, the dog-killer German shepherd watched over them. Rooster didn’t swim, but he did drink from a large bowl of cold water that Danny had given him, while the writer made gin and tonics for Armando and Mary. Looking back, it would be Danny’s sharpest memory of Rooster-the dog was panting with apparent satisfaction near the deep end of the pool. The big shepherd loved little children but hated other male dogs; something in the animal’s history must have made this so, something neither Danny nor the DeSimones ever knew.

Rooster would one day be killed on a back road-struck by a car while he was mindlessly chasing a schoolbus. Violence begets violence, as Ketchum and the cook already knew, as one nearly forgotten hippie carpenter, with one dead dog and one momentarily alive, might one day figure out.

Danny didn’t know it, but he’d taken his last run on the back road between Putney and Westminster West. It was a world of accidents, right? Perhaps it was wise not to be too confrontational in such a world.

BOTH THEIR HUSBANDS had retired from the spruce mill in Milan. A world of small engine repair, and other tinkering, lay ahead of them. The fat sawmill workers’ wives-Dot and May, those bad old broads-took every occasion that presented itself, no matter how much driving was involved, to leave town and their tiresome husbands. Retired men made a nuisance of themselves, the two old ladies had discovered; Dot and May preferred their own company to anyone else’s. Now that May’s younger children (and her older grandchildren) were producing more children, she used the excuse of being needed when whatever mother (and whoever’s new baby) came home from the hospital. Wherever “home” was, it was a way to get out of Milan. Dot was always the driver.

They were both sixty-eight, a couple of years older than Ketchum, whom they spotted occasionally-Ketchum lived in Errol, farther up the Androscoggin. The old logger never recognized Dot or May, nor would he have paid them any attention if he did recognize them, but everyone noticed Ketchum; the woodsman’s reputation as a wild man had marked him, as surely as the scar on his forehead was a vivid advertisement of his violent history. But Dot had put on another sixty pounds, or so, and May another eighty; they were white-haired, with those weatherworn faces you see in the north country, and they ate their way through every day, the way some people in cold climates do, as if they were constantly starving.

They’d come across northern New Hampshire on the Groveton road, through Stark-much of the way, they were following the Ammonoosuc-and in Lancaster they crossed the Connecticut, into Vermont. They intersected I-91 just below St. Johnsbury, and followed the interstate south. They had a long drive ahead of them, but they were in no hurry to get there. May’s daughter or granddaughter had given birth in Springfield, Massachusetts. If Dot and May arrived in time for supper, they would necessarily get themselves involved in feeding a bunch of little kids and cleaning up after them. The two old ladies were smarter than that-they’d decided they would stop somewhere for supper en route. That way, they could have a nice big meal by themselves and arrive in Springfield well after suppertime; with any luck, someone else would have done the dishes and put the littlest kids to bed.

About the time those bad old broads were passing McIndoe Falls on I-91, the cook and his staff were finishing their midafternoon meal at Avellino. To have fed his staff a good meal, and to watch everyone cleaning up and readying themselves for the evening’s dinner service, always made Tony Angel nostalgic. He was thinking about those years in Iowa City in the seventies-that interlude from their life in Vermont, as both the cook and his son remembered it.

In Iowa City, Tony Angel had worked as a sous chef in the Cheng brothers’ Chinese restaurant out on First Avenue -what the cook called the Coralville strip. The Cheng brothers might have had more business if they’d been closer to downtown; they were too upscale for Coralville, overlooked among its fast-food joints and cheap motels, but the brothers liked their proximity to the interstate, and on those Big Ten sports weekends when an Iowa team was competing at home, the restaurant attracted lots of out-of-towners. It was too expensive for most students, anyway-unless their parents were paying-and the university faculty, whom the Chengs considered their target clientele, all had cars and weren’t limited to the bars and restaurants nearer the center of the campus, downtown.

In Tony Angel’s opinion, the name of the Chengs’ restaurant was another questionable business decision-Mao’s might have worked better with politically disenchanted students than it did with their parents, or the out-of-town sports fans-but the Cheng brothers were completely caught up in the anti-war protests of the time. Public opinion, especially in a university town, had turned against the war; from ’72 till ’75, there were many demonstrations outside the Old Capitol on the Iowa campus. Admittedly, Mao’s might have worked better in Madison or Ann Arbor. Out on the Coralville strip, a passing patriot-in a quickly disappearing car or pickup truck-would sometimes lob a brick or a rock through the restaurant’s window.

“A warrior farmer,” said Ah Gou Cheng, dismissively; he was the elder brother. Ah Gou was Shanghai dialect for “Big Brother.”

He was a terrific chef; he’d gone to cooking school at the Culinary Institute of America, and he’d grown up working in Chinese restaurants. Born in Queens, he’d moved to Long Island and then to Manhattan. A woman he’d met in a karate class had lured Ah Gou to Iowa, but she’d left him there. By then, Ah Gou was convinced that Mao’s could make it in Iowa City.

Ah Gou was just old enough to have missed the Vietnam War but not the U.S. Army; he’d been an army cook in Alaska. (“No authentic ingredients there, except the fish,” he’d told Tony Angel.) Ah Gou had a Fu Manchu mustache and a black ponytail with a dyed orange streak in it.

Ah Gou had coached his younger brother on how to stay out of the Vietnam War. In the first place, the little brother hadn’t waited to be drafted-he’d volunteered. “Just say you won’t kill other Asians,” Ah Gou had advised him. “Otherwise, sound gung ho.”

The younger brother had said he would drive any vehicle anywhere, and cook for anyone. (“Show me the combat! I’ll drive into an ambush, I’ll cook in a mortar attack! I just won’t kill other Asians.”)

It was a gamble, of course-the army still might have taken him. Good coaching aside, Tony Angel considered, the younger brother didn’t have to pretend to be crazy-he was certifiable. That he’d saved his little brother from the Vietnam War-and from killing, or being killed by, other Asians-gave Ah Gou a certain chip on his shoulder.

MAO’S DID CLASSIC French or a mix of Asian styles, but Ah Gou kept the Asian and French food separated-with some exceptions. Mao’s version of oysters Rockefeller was topped with panko, Japanese bread crumbs, and Ah Gou used grapeseed oil and shallots to make the mayonnaise for his crabcakes. (The crab was tossed in the Japanese bread crumbs with some chopped tarragon; the panko didn’t get soggy in the fridge, the way other bread crumbs did.)

The problem was, they were in Iowa. Where was Ah Gou going to get panko-not to mention oysters, grapeseed oil, and crabs? That was where the crazy younger brother came in. He was a born driver. Xiao Dee meant “Little Brother” in Shanghai dialect; the Xiao was pronounced like Shaw. Xiao Dee drove the Cheng brothers’ refrigerated truck-complete with two freezer units-to Lower Manhattan, and back, once a week. Tony Angel made the ambitious road trips with him. It was a sixteen-hour drive from Iowa City to Chinatown -to the markets on Pell and Mott streets, where the cook and Xiao Dee shopped.

If a woman in a karate class had lured Ah Gou to Iowa, Xiao Dee had two women driving him nuts-one in Rego Park, the other in Bethpage. The cook didn’t really care which woman Little Brother was seeing. Tony Angel missed the North End, and he was equally fond of the small Chinese communities in Queens and on Long Island; the people were friendly to him and affectionate with one another. (Personally, the cook would have preferred the Rego Park girlfriend, whose name was Spicy, to the one in Bethpage, whose name he could neither remember nor pronounce.) And Tony loved the shopping in Chinatown-even the long drive back to Iowa on I-80. The cook shared the driving on the interstate with Little Brother, but he let Xiao Dee do the driving around New York City.

They would leave Iowa on a Tuesday afternoon, driving all night till dawn; they emerged from the Holland Tunnel onto Hudson and Canal streets before the Wednesday morning rush hour. They were parked in the Pell Street or Mott Street area of Chinatown when the markets opened. They spent Wednesday night in Queens, or on Long Island, and left before the morning rush hour on Thursday. They would drive all day back to Iowa City, and unload the new goods at Mao’s after dinnertime Thursday evening. The weekends were big at Mao’s. Even the oysters and mussels and fresh fish from Chinatown would still be fresh on Friday night-if they were lucky, on Saturday night, too.

The cook had never felt stronger; he’d been forty-eight, forty-nine, and fifty in those Iowa years, but loading and unloading Xiao Dee’s refrigerated truck gave him the muscles of a professional mover. There was a lot of heavy stuff on board: the cases of Tsingtao beer, the vat of salt water with the smoking blocks of dry ice for the mussels, the tubs of crushed ice for the oysters. On the way back, they would usually stop for more ice at a discount-liquor store in Indiana or Illinois. They kept the flounder, the monkfish, the sea bass, the Scottish salmon, the scallops, the shrimp, the lap xuong sausage, and all the crabs on ice, too. The whole way west, the truck melted and sloshed. One of the freezers always smelled like squid; they kept the calamari frozen. The big brown crocks of Tianjin preserved vegetable (from China) had to be wrapped in newspaper or they would crack against themselves and break. It was “asking for bad luck” to pack the Japanese dried anchovies anywhere near the Chinese preserved duck eggs, Xiao Dee said.

Once, when they were crossing the bridge over the Mississippi, at East Moline, they swerved to avoid a bus with a blown-out tire, and all the scents of Asia followed them home: the broken jars of Golden Boy fish sauce for the green Thai curry; the shattered remains of the Chinese soybean sauce (fermented bean curd) and Formosa pork sung; the many jagged edges from the Thai Mae Ploy bottles of sweet chili sauce, and red and green curry paste. The truck was awash with sesame oil and soy sauce, but it was mainly the Hong Kong chili garlic sauce that had endured. The aura of garlic was somehow permeated with the lasting essence of Japanese bonito tuna flakes and dried Chinese shrimp. Black shiitake mushrooms turned up everywhere, for weeks.

The cook and Xiao Dee had pulled off I-80 immediately west of Davenport-just to open the rear door of the truck and survey the spillage from the near-collision over the Mississippi-but an indescribable odor forewarned them not to risk opening the truck until they were back at Mao’s. Something undefined was leaking under the truck’s rear door.

“What does it smell like?” Xiao Dee asked the cook. It was a brownish liquid with beer foam in it-they could both see that much.

“Everything,” Tony Angel answered, kneeling on the pavement and sniffing the bottom of the door.

A motorcycle cop drove up and asked them if they needed assistance. Little Brother kept all the receipts from their shopping in the glove compartment in case they were ever stopped and suspected of transporting stolen goods. The cook explained to the policeman how they’d swerved on the bridge to avoid the incapacitated bus.

“Maybe we should just keep going, and inspect the damage when we get to Iowa City,” Tony said. The baby-faced, clean-shaven Xiao Dee was nodding his head, his glossy black ponytail tied with a pink ribbon, some trifle of affection either Spicy or the other girlfriend had given him.

“It smells like a Chinese restaurant,” the motorcycle cop commented to the cook.

“That’s what it is,” Tony told him.

Both Little Brother and the cook could tell that the cop wanted to see the mess inside; now that they’d stopped, they had no choice but to open the truck’s rear door. There was Asia, or at least the entire continent’s culinary aromas: the pot of lychee nuts with almond-milk gelée, the pungent shock of the strewn fresh ginger, and the Mitoku Trading Company’s brand of miso leaves-the latter giving a fungal appearance to the walls and ceiling of the truck. There was also a ghoulish monkfish staring at them from a foul sea of soy sauce and dark-brown ice-a contender for the title of Ugliest Fish in the World, under the best of circumstances.

“Sweet Jesus, what’s that?” the motorcycle cop asked.

“Monkfish, the poor man’s lobster,” Xiao Dee explained.

“What’s the name of your restaurant in Iowa City?” the cop asked.

“Mao’s,” Xiao Dee answered proudly.

“That place!” the motorcycle cop said. “You get the drive-by vandalism, right?”

“Occasionally,” the cook admitted.

“It’s because of the war,” Xiao Dee said defensively. “The farmers are hawks.”

“It’s because of the name!” the cop said. “Mao’s-no wonder you get vandalized! This is the Midwest, you know. Iowa City isn’t Berkeley !”

Back in the truck that would forever smell like all of Pell and Mott streets on a bad morning (such as when there was a garbage strike in Lower Manhattan), the cook said to Little Brother, “The cop has a point, you know. About the name, I mean.”

Xiao Dee was hopped up on chocolate-espresso balls, which he kept in the glove compartment with all the receipts and ate nonstop when he drove-just to keep himself fanatically awake. If the cook had more than two or three on the sixteen-hour drive, his heart would race until the following day-his bowels indicating the pending onset of explosive diarrhea-as if he’d had two dozen cups of double espresso.

“What’s the matter with this country? Mao is just a name!” Xiao Dee cried. “This country has been getting its balls cut off in Vietnam for ten years! What does Mao have to do with it-it’s just a name!” The provocative pink ribbon Spicy (or the other girl) had tied around his ponytail had come undone; Xiao Dee resembled a hysterical woman weightlifter driving an entire Chinese restaurant, where you would surely be food-poisoned to death.

“Let’s just get home and unload the truck,” the cook proposed, hoping to calm Little Brother down. Tony Angel was trying to forget the image of the monkfish swimming through sesame oil, and everything else that was afloat in the back of the truck.

The vat of sea water had spilled; they’d lost all the mussels. There would be no sake-steamed mussels in black-bean sauce that weekend. No oysters Rockefeller, either. (To add insult to injury, by the time Xiao Dee and the cook got back to Iowa City, Ah Gou had already chopped the spinach and diced the bacon for the oysters Rockefeller.) The sea bass had perished en route, but the monkfish was salvageable-the tail was the only usable part, anyway, and Ah Gou served it sliced in medallions.

The cook had learned to test the freshness of the Scottish salmon by deboning it; if the bones were hard to pull out, Ah Gou said the fish was still pretty fresh. The lap xuong sausage, the fresh flounder, and the frozen squid had survived the near collision with the bus, but not the shrimp, the scallops, or the crabs. Ah Gou’s favorite mascarpone and the Parmesan were safe, but the other cheeses had to go. The bamboo mats, or nori rolls-for rolling out the sushi-had absorbed too much sesame oil and Tsingtao beer. Xiao Dee would hose out the truck every day for months, but it would always smell of that near accident over the Mississippi.

HE’D LOVED THAT TIME in Iowa City -including those road trips with Xiao Dee Cheng, Tony Angel was thinking. Every night, on the menu at Avellino, was an item or two the cook had acquired from working with Ah Gou at Mao’s. At Avellino, the cook indicated the French or Asian additions to his menu by writing simply, “Something from Asia” or “Something from France;” he’d learned this from Ah Gou at Mao’s. In an emergency, when all the fish (and the oysters and mussels) had perished before Saturday night, Ah Gou asked the cook to do a pasta special or a pizza.

“Something from Italy,” the menu at Mao’s would then say.

The long-distance truckers who stopped off the interstate would invariably complain. “What’s this fucking ‘Something from Italy ’ about? I thought this was a Chinese place.”

“We’re a little of everything,” Xiao Dee would tell them-Little Brother was usually the weekend maître d’, while the cook and Ah Gou slaved away in the kitchen.

The rest of the staff at Mao’s was a fiercely intelligent and multicultural collection of Asian students from the university-many of them not from Asia but from Seattle and San Francisco, or Boston, or New York. Tzu-Min, Ah Gou’s relatively new girlfriend, was a Chinese law-school student who’d been an undergraduate at Iowa just a couple of years before; she’d decided to stay in Iowa City (and not go back to Taiwan) because of Mao’s and Ah Gou and the law school. On Thursday nights, when Xiao Dee was still suffering the jazzed-up aftereffects of the chocolate-espresso balls, Tzu-Min would sub as the maître d’.

They didn’t have a radio at Mao’s, Tony Angel was remembering as he surveyed the place settings at Avellino, which on that late-spring ’83 night was not quite open for business but soon would be. At Mao’s, Ah Gou had kept a TV in the kitchen-the cause of many cut fingers, and other knife or cleaver accidents, in the cook’s opinion. But Ah Gou had liked sports and news; sometimes the Iowa football or basketball games were televised, and that way the kitchen knew in advance whether to expect a celebratory or dejected crowd after the game.

In those years, the Iowa wrestling team rarely lost-least of all, at home-and those dual meets brought an especially fired-up and hungry crowd to Mao’s. Daniel had taken young Joe to most of the home matches, the cook suddenly remembered. Maybe it had been the success of the Iowa wrestling team that made Joe want to wrestle when he went off to Northfield Mount Hermon; quite possibly, Ketchum’s reputation as a barroom brawler had had nothing to do with it.

Tony Angel had a Garland eight-burner stove, with two ovens and a broiler, in his kitchen at Avellino; he had a steam table for his chicken stocks, too. At Mao’s, at their busiest, they could seat eighty or ninety people in an evening, but Avellino was smaller. Tony rarely fed more than thirty or forty people a night-fifty, tops.

Tonight the cook was working on a red-wine reduction for the braised beef short ribs, and he had both a light and a dark chicken stock on the steam table. In the “Something from Asia ” category, he was serving Ah Gou’s beef satay with peanut sauce and assorted tempura-just some shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. There were the usual pasta dishes-the calamari with black olives and pine nuts, over penne, among them-and two popular pizzas, the pepperoni with marinara sauce and a wild-mushroom pizza with four cheeses. He had a roast chicken with rosemary, which was served on a bed of arugula and grilled fennel, and a grilled leg of spring lamb with garlic, and a wild-mushroom risotto, too.

Greg, the cook’s young sous chef, had been to cooking school on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and was a fast learner. Tony was letting Greg do a sauce grenobloise, with brown butter and capers, for the chicken paillard-that was the little “Something from France ” for the evening. And Tony’s two favorite waitresses were on hand, a single mother and her college-student daughter. Celeste, the mom, had worked for the cook since ’76, and the daughter, Loretta, was more mature than the usual Brattleboro high school kids he hired as waitresses, busboys, and dishwashers.

Loretta was older than most college students; she’d had a baby her senior year in high school. Loretta was unmarried and had cared for the child in her mom’s house until the little boy was old enough (four or five) to not drive Celeste crazy. Then Loretta had gotten into a nearby community college-not the easiest commute, but she’d arranged all her classes on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule. She was back home in Brattleboro, still living with her mom and young son, from every Thursday night till the following Tuesday morning.

Since the cook had been sleeping with Celeste-only for the last year, going on eighteen months-the arrangement had worked well for Tony Angel. He stayed in Celeste’s house, with Celeste and her first-grade grandson, only two nights a week-on one of which, every Wednesday, the restaurant was closed. The cook moved back into his apartment whenever Loretta came home to Brattleboro. It had been more awkward last summer, when Celeste moved into Tony’s small apartment above Avellino for upwards of three or four nights at a time. A redhead, with very fetching freckles on her chest, she was a big woman, though not nearly the size of either Injun Jane or Carmella. Celeste (at fifty) was as many years older than the cook’s son, Danny, as she was younger than the cook.

There was no hanky-panky between them in the kitchen at Avellino -at their mutual insistence-though everyone on the staff (Loretta, of course, included) knew that Tony Angel and Celeste were a couple. The lady friends the cook had met at The Book Cellar had since moved on, or they were married now. The old joke Tony cracked to the bookseller was no longer acted upon; it was an innocent joke when the cook asked the bookseller if she knew any women to introduce him to. (She either didn’t or she wouldn’t, not with Celeste in the picture. Brattleboro was a small town, and Celeste was a popular presence in it.)

It had been easier to meet women in Iowa, Tony Angel was remembering. Granted, he was older now, and Brattleboro was a very small town compared to Iowa City, where Danny had invited his dad to all the Writers’ Workshop parties; those women writers knew how to have a good time.

Danny had treated his workshop students to an evening at Mao’s on many occasions-not least the celebration of the Chinese New Year, every January or February, when Ah Gou had presented a ten-course prix-fixe menu for three nights in a row. Just before the Chinese New Year in ’73-it was the Year of the Ox, the cook remembered-Xiao Dee’s truck had broken down in Pennsylvania, and Tony Angel and Little Brother almost hadn’t made it back to Iowa City with the goods in time.

In ’74-the Year of the Tiger, Tony thought-Xiao Dee had convinced Spicy to ride along to Iowa City with them, all the way from Queens. Spicy was fortunately small, but it was still a tight squeeze in the truck’s cab, and somewhere in Indiana or Illinois, Spicy figured out that Xiao Dee had been seeing a woman in Bethpage-“that Nassau County cunt,” Spicy called her. The cook had listened to them argue the rest of the way.

Somehow, thinking of Iowa City and Mao’s had made Tony Angel consider that Avellino lacked ambition, but one of the things the cook loved about his Brattleboro restaurant was that it was relatively easy to run; real chefs, like Ah Gou Cheng and Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari, might find Avellino unambitious, but the cook (at fifty-nine) wasn’t trying to compete with them.

One sadness was that Tony Angel wouldn’t invite his old friends and mentors to come visit him in Vermont, and have a meal at Avellino. The cook felt that his Brattleboro restaurant was unworthy of these superior chefs, who’d taught him so much, though they probably would have been touched and flattered to have seen their obvious good influences on the menu at Avellino, and they surely would have supported the cook’s pride in having his very own restaurant, which-albeit only in Brattleboro-was a local success. Since Molinari and Polcari were retired, they could have come to Vermont at their convenience; it might have been harder for the Cheng brothers to find the time.

Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had moved back East, this on the good counsel of Tzu-Min, the young Chinese lawyer who’d married Big Brother-she’d given him some solid business advice, and had never gone back to Taiwan. Connecticut was closer to Lower Manhattan, where Little Brother needed to shop; it made no sense for the Chengs to kill themselves while striving for authenticity in Iowa. The first name of their new restaurant, Baozi, meant “Wrapped” in Chinese. (The cook remembered the golden pork spring rolls and braised pork baozi that Ah Gou made every Chinese New Year. The steamed dough balls were split, like a sandwich, and filled with a braised pork shoulder that had been shredded and mixed with Chinese five-spice powder.) But Tzu-Min was the businessperson in the Cheng family; she changed the name of the restaurant to Lemongrass, which was both more marketable and more comprehensible in Connecticut.

One day, Tony Angel thought, maybe Daniel and I can drive down to Connecticut and eat at Lemongrass; we could spend the night somewhere in the vicinity. The cook missed Ah Gou and Xiao Dee, and he wished them well.

“What’s the matter, Tony?” Celeste asked him. (The cook was crying, though he’d not been aware of it.)

“Nothing’s the matter, Celeste. In fact, I’m very happy,” Tony said. He smiled at her and bent over his red-wine reduction, savoring the smell. He’d blanched a sprig of fresh rosemary in boiling water, just to draw out the oil before putting the rosemary in the red wine.

“Yeah, well, you’re crying,” Celeste told him.

“Memories, I guess,” the cook said. Greg, the sous chef, was watching him, too. Loretta came into the kitchen from the dining room.

“Are we going to unlock the place tonight, or make the customers find a way to break in?” she asked the cook.

“Oh, is it time?” Tony Angel asked. He must have left his watch upstairs in the bedroom, where he’d not yet finished the galleys of East of Bangor.

“What’s he crying about?” Loretta asked her mother.

“I was just asking him,” Celeste said. “Memories, I guess.”

“Good ones, huh?” Loretta asked the cook; she took a clean dish towel from the rack and patted his cheek. Even the dishwasher and the busboy, two Brattleboro high school kids, were watching Tony Angel with concern.

The cook and his sous chef were not rigid about sticking to their stations, though normally Greg did the grilling, roasting, and broiling, while Tony watched over the sauces.

“You want me to be the saucier tonight, boss?” Greg asked the cook.

“I’m fine,” Tony told them all, shaking his head. “Don’t you ever have memories?”

“Danny called-I forgot to tell you,” Loretta said to the cook. “He’s coming in tonight.”

“Yeah, Danny sounds like he had an exciting day-for a writer,” Celeste told Tony. “He got attacked by two dogs. Rooster killed one. He wanted a table at the usual time, but just for one. He said that Barrett wouldn’t appreciate the dog story. He said, ‘Tell Pop I’ll see him later.’”

The “Pop” had its origins in Iowa City -the cook liked it.

Barrett was originally from England; though she’d lived in the United States for years, her English accent struck Tony Angel as sounding more and more English every time he heard it. People in America were overly impressed by English accents, the cook thought. Perhaps English accents made many Americans feel uneducated.

Tony knew what his son had meant by Barrett not appreciating the dog story. Although Danny had been bitten by dogs when he was running, Barrett was one of those animal lovers who always took the dog’s side. (There were no “bad” dogs, only bad dog owners; the Vermont State Police should never shoot anyone’s dog; if Danny didn’t run with the squash-racquet handles, maybe the dogs wouldn’t try to bite him, and so forth.) But the cook knew that his son ran with the racquet handles because he’d been bitten when he ran without them-he’d needed stitches twice but the rabies shots only once.

Tony Angel was glad that his son wasn’t coming to dinner with Barrett. It bothered the cook that Daniel had ever slept with a woman almost as old as his own father! But Barrett’s Englishness and her belief that there were no bad dogs bothered Tony more. Well, wasn’t an unexamined love of dogs to be expected from a horse person? the cook asked himself.

Tony Angel used an old Stanley woodstove from Ireland for his pizzas; he knew how to keep the oven at six hundred degrees without making the rest of the kitchen too hot, but it had taken him two years to figure it out. He was refilling the woodbox in the Stanley when he heard Loretta unlocking the front door and inviting the first customers into the dining room.

“There was another phone call,” Greg told the cook.

Tony hoped that Daniel hadn’t changed his mind about coming to dinner, or that his son hadn’t decided to bring Barrett with him, but the other message was from Ketchum.

The old logger had gone on and on to Greg about the miraculous invention of the fax machine. God knows for how long fax machines had been invented, the cook thought, but this was not the first he’d heard about Ketchum wanting one. Danny had been to New York and seen some rudimentary fax machine in operation in the production department of his publishing house; in Daniel’s estimation, his father recalled, it had been a bulky machine that produced oily scraps of paper with hard-to-read writing, but this didn’t deter Ketchum. The formerly illiterate woodsman wanted Danny and his dad to have fax machines; then Ketchum would get one, and they could all be instantly in contact with one another.

Dear God, the cook was thinking, there would be no end of faxes; I’ll have to buy reams of paper. And there will be no more peaceful mornings, Tony Angel thought; he loved his morning coffee and his favorite view of the Connecticut. (Like the cook, Ketchum was an early riser.)

Tony Angel had never seen where Ketchum lived in Errol, but he’d envisioned something from the wanigan days-a trailer maybe, or several trailers. Formerly mobile homes, perhaps, but no longer mobile-or a Volkswagen bus with a woodstove inside it, and without any wheels. That Ketchum (at sixty-six) had only recently learned to read but now wanted a fax machine was unimaginable. Not that long ago, Ketchum hadn’t even owned a phone!

THE COOK KNEW WHY he had cried; his “memories” had nothing to do with it. As soon as he’d thought of taking a trip with his son to see the Chengs in their Connecticut restaurant, Tony Angel had known that Daniel would never do it. The writer was a workaholic; to the cook’s thinking, a kind of logorrhea had possessed his son. That Daniel was coming to dinner at Avellino alone was fine with Tony Angel, but that his son was alone (and probably would remain so) made the cook cry. If he worried about his grandson, Joe-for all the obvious dangers any eighteen-year-old needed to be lucky to escape-the cook was sorry that his son, Daniel, struck him as a terminally lonely, melancholic soul. He’s even lonelier and more melancholic than I am! Tony Angel was thinking.

“Table of four,” Loretta was saying to Greg, the sous chef. “One wild-mushroom pizza, one pepperoni,” she told the cook.

Celeste came into the kitchen from the dining room. “Danny’s here, alone,” she said to Tony.

“One calamari with penne,” Loretta went on, reciting. When it was busy, she just left the two cooks her orders in writing, but when there was almost no one in Avellino, Loretta seemed to enjoy the drama of an out-loud presentation.

“The table of four doesn’t want any first courses?” Greg asked her.

“They all want the arugula salad with the shaved Parmesan,” Loretta said. “You’ll love this one.” She paused for the full effect. “One chicken paillard, but hold the capers.”

“Christ,” Greg said. “A sauce grenobloise is all about the capers.”

“Just give the bozo the red-wine reduction with rosemary-it’s as good on the chicken as it is on the braised beef,” Tony Angel said.

“It’ll turn the chicken purple, Tony,” his sous chef complained.

“You’re such a purist, Greg,” the cook said. “Then give the bozo the paillard with a little olive oil and lemon.”

“Danny says to surprise him,” Celeste told Tony. She was watching the cook closely. She’d heard him cry in his sleep, too.

“Well, that will be fun,” the cook said. (Finally, there’s a smile-albeit a small one-Celeste was thinking.)

MAY WAS A TALKATIVE PASSENGER. While Dot drove-her head nodding, but usually not in rhythm to whatever junk was playing on the radio-May read most of the road signs out loud, the way children who’ve only recently learned to read sometimes do.

“ Bellows Falls,” May had announced, as they’d passed that exit on I-91-maybe fifteen or more minutes ago. “Who would want to live in Bellows Falls?”

“You been there?” Dot asked her old friend.

“Nope. It just sounds awful,” May said.

“It’s beginnin’ to look like suppertime, isn’t it?” Dot asked.

“I could eat a little somethin’,” May admitted.

“Like what?” Dot asked.

“Oh, just half a bear or a whole cow, I guess,” May said, cackling. Dot cackled with her.

“Even half a cow would hit the spot,” Dot more seriously proposed.

“Putney,” May read out loud, as they passed the exit sign.

“What kinda name is that, do you suppose? Not Injun, from the sound of it,” Dot said.

“Nope. Not Injun,” May agreed. The three Brattleboro exits were coming up.

“How ’bout a pizza?” Dot said.

“BRAT-el-burrow,” May enunciated with near perfection.

“Definitely not an Injun name!” Dot said, and the two old ladies cackled some more.

“There’s gotta be a pizza place in Brattleboro, don’tcha think?” May asked her friend.

“Let’s have a look,” Dot said. She took the second Brattleboro exit, which brought her onto Main Street.

“The Book Cellar,” May read out loud, as they drove slowly past the bookstore on their right.

When they got to the next traffic light, and the steep part of the hill, they could see the marquee for the Latchis Theatre. A couple of the previous year’s movies were playing-a Sylvester Stallone double feature, Rocky III and First Blood.

“I saw those movies,” Dot said proudly.

“You saw them with me,” May reminded her.

The two ladies were easily distracted by the movie marquee at the Latchis, and Dot was driving; Dot couldn’t drive and look at both sides of the street at the same time. If it hadn’t been for May, her hungry passenger and compulsive sign-reader, they might have missed seeing Avellino altogether. The Avellino word was a tough one for May; she stumbled over it but managed to say, “Italian cooking.”

“Where?” Dot asked; they had already driven past it.

“Back there. Park somewhere,” May told her friend. “It said ‘Italian’-I know it did.”

They ended up in the supermarket parking lot before Dot could gather her driving wits about her. “Now we’ll just have to hoof it,” she said to May.

Dot didn’t like to hoof it; she had a bunion that was killing her and caused her to limp, which made May recall Cookie’s limp, so that Cookie had been on the bad old broads’ minds lately. (Also, the Injun conversation in the car might have made them remember their long-ago time in Twisted River.)

“I would walk a mile for a pizza, or two,” May told her old friend.

“One of Cookie’s pizzas, anyway,” Dot said, and that did it.

“Oh, weren’t they good!” May exclaimed. They had waddled their way to the Latchis, on the wrong side of the street, and were nearly killed crossing Main Street in a haphazard fashion. (Maybe Milan was more forgiving to pedestrians than Brattleboro.) Both Dot and May gave the finger to the driver who’d almost hit them.

“What was it Cookie wanted to put in his pizza dough?” Dot asked May.

“Honey!” May said, and they both cackled. “But he changed his mind about it,” May remembered.

“I wonder what his secret ingredient was,” Dot said.

“Didn’t have one, maybe,” May replied, with a shrug. They had stopped in front of the big picture window at Avellino, where May struggled out loud to say the restaurant’s name.

“It sure sounds like real Italian,” Dot decided. The two women read the menu that was posted in the window. “Two different pizzas,” Dot observed.

“I’m stickin’ to the pepperoni,” May told her friend. “You can die eatin’ wild mushrooms.”

“The thing about Cookie’s crust was that it was really thin, so you could eat a lot more pizza without gettin’ filled up,” Dot was remembering.

Inside, a family of four was finishing their meal-Dot and May could see that the two kids had ordered pizzas. There was a good-looking man, maybe fortyish, sitting alone at a table near the swinging doors to the kitchen. He was writing in a notebook-just a lined notebook of the kind students use. The old ladies didn’t recognize Danny, of course. He’d been twelve when they’d last seen him, and now he was a whole decade older than his father was when Dot and May had last seen the cook.

Danny had looked up when the old ladies came in, but he’d quickly turned his attention back to whatever he was writing. He might not even have remembered what Dot and May looked like in 1954; twenty-nine years later, Danny didn’t have the slightest idea who those bad old broads were.

“Just the two of you, ladies?” Celeste asked them. (It always amused Dot and May when anyone thought of them as “ladies.”)

They were given a table near the window, under the old black-and-white photograph of the long-ago logjam in Brattleboro. “They used to drive logs down the Connecticut,” Dot said to May.

“This must have been a mill town, in its day,” May remarked. “Sawmills, paper, maybe-textiles, too, I suppose.”

“There’s an insane asylum in this town, I hear,” Dot told her friend. When the waitress came to pour them water, Dot asked Celeste about it. “Is the loony bin still operatin’ here?”

“It’s called the retreat,” Celeste explained.

“That’s a sneaky fuck of a name for it!” May said. She and Dot were cackling again when Celeste went to get them menus. (She’d forgotten to bring the old biddies menus when she brought them their water. Celeste was still distracted by the cook’s crying.)

A young couple came in, and Dot and May observed a younger waitress-Celeste’s daughter, Loretta-showing them to their table. When Celeste came back with the menus, Dot said, “We’ll both have the pepperoni pizza.” (She and May had already had a look at the menu in the window.)

“One each or one to share?” Celeste asked them. (Just looking at these two, Celeste knew the answer.)

“One each,” May told her.

“Would you like a salad, or a first course?” Celeste asked the old ladies.

“Nope. I’m saving room for the apple pie,” May answered.

Dot said: “I imagine I’ll be havin’ the blueberry cobbler.”

They both ordered Cokes-“real ones,” May emphasized to Celeste. For the drive ahead, not to mention the slew of children and grandchildren, Dot and May wanted all the caffeine and sugar they could get.

“I swear,” May said to Dot, “if my kids and grandkids keep havin’ more kids, you can check me into that so-called retreat.”

“I’ll come visit you,” her friend Dot told her. “If the pizza’s any good,” she added.

In the kitchen at Avellino, maybe the cook had heard the old ladies cackling. “Two pepperoni pizzas,” Celeste told him. “Two probable pie and cobbler customers.”

“Who are they?” the cook asked her; he wasn’t usually so curious. “A couple of locals?”

“A couple of bad old broads, if you ask me-locals or otherwise,” Celeste said.

It was almost time for the Red Sox game on the radio. Boston was playing at home, in Fenway Park, but Greg was listening to some sentimental crap called The Oldie-But-Goldie Hour on another station. The cook hadn’t really been paying attention, but the featured recording, from 1967, was Surrealistic Pillow-the old Jefferson Airplane album.

When Tony Angel recognized Grace Slick’s voice singing “Somebody to Love,” he spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to his sous chef.

“Time for the game, Greg,” the cook said.

“Just lemme hear-” the sous chef started to say, but Tony abruptly switched stations. (Everyone had heard the impatience in his voice and seen the angry way he’d reached for the radio.)

All the cook could say for himself was: “I don’t like that song.”

With a shrug, Celeste said to them all: “Memories, I guess.”

Just one thin wall and two swinging doors away were two more old memories. Unfortunately, the cook would not get rid of Dot and May as easily as he’d cut off that song on the radio.

CHAPTER 9. THE FRAGILE, UNPREDICTABLE NATURE OF THINGS

OUT ON THE CORALVILLE STRIP, WITHIN SIGHT OF MAO’S, there’d been a pizza place called The Greek’s; kalamata olives and feta cheese was the favorite topping. (As Danny’s dad had said at the time, “It isn’t bad, but it isn’t pizza.”) In downtown Iowa City was an imitation Irish pub called O’Rourke’s-pool tables, green beer every St. Patrick’s Day, bratwurst or meatball sandwiches. To Danny, O’Rourke’s was strictly a student hangout-an unconvincing copy of those Boston pubs south of the Haymarket, in the vicinity of Hanover Street. The oldest of these was the Union Oyster House, a clam bar and restaurant, which would one day be across the street from a Holocaust commemoration site, but there was also the Bell in Hand Tavern on the corner of Union and Marshall streets-a pub where the underage Daniel Baciagalupo had gotten drunk on beer with his older Saetta and Calogero cousins.

Those taverns had not been far enough out of the North End to have escaped the cook’s attention. One day he’d followed Daniel and his cousins to the Bell in Hand. When the cook saw his young son drinking a beer, he’d pulled the boy out of the tavern by his ear.

As the writer Danny Angel sat working away in his notebook at Avellino-waiting for his dad, the cook, to surprise him-he wished that his humiliation in the Bell in Hand, in front of his older cousins, had been sufficient to make him stop drinking before he really got started. But in order to stop himself, Danny had needed a greater fright and subsequent humiliation than that earlier misadventure in a Boston bar. It would come, but not before he was a father. (“If becoming a parent doesn’t make you responsible,” the cook had once said to his son, “nothing will.”)

Had Danny been thinking as a father when he’d typed a one-page message to the hippie carpenter, and had driven out the back road to Westminster West in order to put the message in the asshole dog owner’s mailbox, before driving to Brattleboro and his surprise dinner at Avellino? Was this what the writer would have wanted young Joe to do, if his son were to find himself in a similarly hostile situation?

“I am truly sorry your dog is dead,” Danny had typed. “I was angry. You take no responsibility for your dogs, and you won’t acknowledge that a public road is not your dogs’ territory. But I should have held my temper better than I did. I’ll run somewhere else. You’ve lost a dog; I’ll give up my favorite run. Enough is enough, okay?”

It was just a plain piece of typing paper. The writer didn’t include his name. If Armando was right-if the asshole was a writer carpenter, and/or one of Danny’s former students at Windham -then of course the infuriating dog owner already knew that the runner with the squash-racquet handles was the writer Danny Angel. But Danny saw no reason to advertise this. He didn’t put the piece of paper in an envelope, either; he’d just folded it twice and put it in the dog owner’s mailbox, out where the driveway lined with dead vehicles met the road.

Now, as he sat writing in Avellino, Danny knew what Armando would say: “You don’t try to make peace with assholes,” or words to that effect. But Armando didn’t have children. Did that make Armando more unafraid? The very idea of an altercation escalating out of control-well, wasn’t that high on the list of things to protect your children from? (In the notebook, where Danny was scribbling to himself, the phrase “a nameless fear” stood out with an identifying awkwardness in several unfinished sentences.)

As a boy, and as a young man, Danny had always assumed that his dad and Ketchum were different, chiefly because his dad was a cook and Ketchum was a river driver-a logger, tougher than his caulk boots, an intemperate woodsman who would never back down from a fight.

But Ketchum was estranged from his children; he’d already lost them. It wasn’t necessarily true that Ketchum was braver, or more bold, than the cook. Ketchum wasn’t a father, not anymore; he didn’t have as much to lose. Danny only now understood that his dad had been doing his best to look out for him. Leaving Twisted River had been a father’s decision. And the cook and his son were both trying to look out for young Joe; their mutual fear for the boy had brought Danny and his dad closer together.

He’d felt close to his father in Iowa City, too, the writer was remembering. (Their Asian interlude, as Danny thought of Iowa that second time around.) His dad’s steadiest girlfriend those years in Iowa City had been an ER nurse at Mercy Hospital -Yi-Yiing was Chinese. She was Danny’s age-in her early thirties, almost twenty years younger than the cook-and she had a daughter, who was Joe’s age, back in Hong Kong. Her husband had left her upon the daughter’s birth-he’d wanted a son-and Yi-Yiing had trusted her mother and father to care for her child while she’d made a new life for herself in the Midwest. The nursing career had been a good choice, and so had Iowa City. The doctors at Mercy Hospital had declared that Yi-Yiing was indispensable. She had her green card and was on track to become a U.S. citizen.

Of course Yi-Yiing would hear the occasional gook word-the most common insult from a prejudiced patient in the emergency room, and from an unseen driver or passenger in a moving car. But it didn’t faze her to be mistaken for the war bride of a Vietnam vet. She had a harder, uphill task ahead of her-namely, moving her daughter and her parents to the United States -but she was well on her way to unraveling the red tape that was involved. Yi-Yiing had her own reasons for remaining undistracted from achieving her goal. (She’d been assured it would be easier to bring her family to the United States once the war in Vietnam was over; it was “only a matter of time,” a reliable authority had told her.)

What Yi-Yiing had said to Tony Angel was that it wasn’t the time for her to be “romantically involved.” Maybe this was music to his dad’s ears, Danny had thought at the time. Quite possibly, given Yi-Yiing’s heroic undertaking, the cook was a consoling and undemanding partner for her; with so much of his life lost to the past, Tony Angel wasn’t exactly seeking so-called romantic involvement, either. Moreover, that the cook’s grandson was the same age as Yi-Yiing’s daughter gave the nurse a motherly affection for young Joe.

Danny and his dad always had to think about Joe before including new women in their lives. Danny had liked Yi-Yiing-no small part of the reason being how sincerely she’d paid attention to Joe-though it was awkward that Yi-Yiing was Danny’s age, and that the writer was attracted to her.

In those three years, Danny and his dad had rented three different houses on Court Street in Iowa City -all from tenured faculty on sabbaticals. Court Street was tree-lined with large, three-story houses; it was a kind of residential faculty row. The street was also within safe walking distance of the Longfellow Elementary School, where Joe would attend second, third, and fourth grades. Court Street was somewhat removed from downtown Iowa City, and Danny never had to drive on Iowa Avenue, where he’d earlier lived with Katie-not, in any case, on his way to and from the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa River. (The EPB, as it was called, was where Danny’s office at the Writers’ Workshop was.)

As big as the rental houses on Court Street were, Danny didn’t write at home-largely because Yi-Yiing worked irregular hours in the ER at Mercy Hospital. She often slept in the cook’s bedroom until midday, when she would come down to the kitchen and fix herself something to eat in her silk pajamas. When she wasn’t working at the hospital, Yi-Yiing lived in her slinky Hong Kong pajamas.

Danny liked walking Joe to school, and then going to write at the English-Philosophy Building. When his office door was closed, his students and the other faculty knew not to bother him. (Yi-Yiing was small of stature, short but surprisingly heavyset, with a pretty face and long, coal-black hair. She had many pairs of the silk pajamas, in a variety of vibrant colors; as Danny recalled, even her black pajamas appeared to vibrate.) This parenthetical non sequitur, long after he’d begun his morning’s writing-an alluring image of Yi-Yiing in her vibrating pajamas, asleep in his father’s bed-was a lingering distraction. Yi-Yiing and her pajamas, or their enticing presence, traveled to the English-Philosophy Building with Danny.

“I don’t know how you can write in such a sterile building,” the writer Raymond Carver said of the EPB. Ray was a colleague of Danny Angel’s at the workshop in those years.

“It’s not as… sterile as you may think,” Danny said to Ray.

Another writer colleague, John Cheever, compared the EPB to a hotel-“one catering to conventioneers”-but Danny liked his fourth-floor office there. Most mornings, the offices and classrooms of the Writers’ Workshop were deserted. No one but the workshop’s administrative assistant was ever there, and she was good about taking messages and not putting through any phone calls-not unless there was a call from young Joe or Danny’s dad.

The aesthetics of a given workplace notwithstanding, writers tend to love where they work well. For as much of the day as Joe was safe in school, Danny grew to love the EPB. The fourth floor was silent, a virtual sanctuary-provided he left by midafternoon.

Usually, writers don’t confine their writing to the good things, do they? Danny Angel was thinking, as he scribbled away in his notebook at Avellino, where Iowa City was foremost on his mind. “The Baby in the Road,” he had written-a chapter title, possibly, but there was more to it than that. He’d crossed out the The and had written, “A Baby in the Road,” but neither article pleased him-he quickly crossed out the A, too. Above where he was writing, on the same page of the notebook, was more evidence of the writer’s reluctance to use an article-“The Blue Mustang” had been revised to “Blue Mustang.” (Maybe just “Baby in the Road” was the way to go?)

To anyone seeing the forty-one-year-old writer’s expression, this exercise was both more meaningful and more painful than a mere title search. To Dot and May, the troubled-looking young author seemed strangely attractive and familiar; waiting for their food, they both watched him intently. In the absence of signs to read out loud, May was at a momentary loss for words, but Dot whispered to her friend: “Whatever he’s writin’, he’s not havin’ any fun doin’ it.”

“I could give him some fun doin’ it!” May whispered back, and both ladies commenced to cackling, in their inimitable fashion.

At this moment in time, it took a lot to distract Danny from his writing. The blue Mustang and the baby in the road had seized the writer’s attention, almost completely; that one or the other might make a good title was immaterial. Both the blue Mustang and the baby in the road were triggers to Danny’s imagination, and they meant much more to him than titles. Yet the distinctive cackles of the two old ladies caused Danny to look up from his notebook, whereupon Dot and May quickly looked away. They’d been staring at him-that much was clear to Danny, who would have sworn that he’d heard the fat women’s indelible and derisive laughter before. But where, and when?

Too long ago for Danny to remember, obviously, seized as he was by those fresher, more memorable details, the speeding blue Mustang and that helpless baby in the road. Danny was a far distance from the twelve-year-old he’d been in the cookhouse kitchen, where (and when) Dot and May’s cackling had once been as constant as punctuation. The writer returned his attention to his notebook; he was imagining Iowa City, but he was closer to that time in Twisted River than he could have known.

THEIR FIRST YEAR ON COURT STREET, Danny and his dad and Joe gradually grew used to sharing the house with Yi-Yiing and her vibrant pajamas. She’d arranged her schedule at the hospital so that she was usually in the house when Joe came home from school. This was before Joe’s bike-riding began in earnest, and what girlfriends Danny had were transient; the writer’s passing acquaintances rarely spent the night in the Court Street house. The cook left for the kitchen at Mao’s every midafternoon-that is, when he wasn’t driving to Lower Manhattan and back with Xiao Dee Cheng.

Those two nights a week when Tony Angel was on the road, Yi-Yiing didn’t stay in the Court Street house. She’d kept her own apartment, near Mercy Hospital; maybe she knew all along that Danny was attracted to her-Yi-Yiing did nothing to encourage him. It was the cook and young Joe who received all her attention, though she’d been the first to speak to Danny when Joe started riding his bike to school. By then, they’d all moved into the second house on Court Street; it was nearer the commuter traffic on Muscatine Avenue, but there were only small backstreets between Court Street and the Longfellow Elementary School. Even so, Yi-Yiing told Danny that he should make Joe ride his bike on the sidewalk-and when the boy had to cross a street, he should walk his bike, she said.

“Kids on bikes get hit by cars all the time in this town,” Yi-Yiing told Danny. He tried to overlook whichever pair of pajamas she was wearing at the moment; he knew he should focus on her experience as an emergency-room nurse. “I see them all the time-there was one in the ER last night,” she said.

“Some kid was riding his bike at night?” Danny asked her.

“He got hit on Dodge Street when it was still daylight, but he was in the ER all night,” Yi-Yiing said.

“Is he going to be all right?” Danny asked.

Yi-Yiing shook her head; she was making tea for herself in the kitchen of the second Court Street house, and a thin piece of toast dangled like a cigarette from her lower lip. Joe was home sick from school, and Danny had been writing at the kitchen table. “Just make Joe ride his bike on the sidewalk,” Yi-Yiing said, “and if he wants to go downtown-or to the pool, or the zoo, in City Park-for God’s sake, make him walk or take the bus.”

“Okay,” Danny told her. She sat down at the table with him, with her tea and the rest of her toast.

“What are you doing home?” Yi-Yiing asked him. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m awake. You should go write in your office. I’m a nurse, Danny-I can look after Joe.”

“Okay,” Danny said again. Just how safe could Joe get? the writer was wondering. The boy had an ER nurse taking care of him, not to mention two Japanese babysitters.

Most nights, both the cook and his emergency-room nurse were working; either Danny stayed home with Joe, or one of the Japanese twins looked after the boy. Sao and Kaori’s parents were from Yokohama originally, but the twins had been born in San Francisco and they’d grown up there. One night the cook had brought them home from Mao’s; he’d woken up Danny to introduce him to the twins, and he’d taken Sao and Kaori into Joe’s room to allow them to observe the sleeping boy. “See?” Tony whispered to the twins, while Danny lay bewildered and barely awake in his bed. “This child is an angel-he’s easy to look after.”

The cook had disapproved of Danny asking his workshop students to babysit for Joe. Danny’s students were writers-hence easily distracted, or preoccupied, in Tony Angel’s opinion. Young writers lived in their imaginations, didn’t they? the cook had asked his son. (Danny knew that his dad had always distrusted imagination.) Furthermore, these young writers were graduate students; many of them were older than the usual graduate students, too. “They’re too old to be competent babysitters!” the cook had said. His dad’s theory was new to Danny, but he liked Sao and Kaori, the identical twins-though he could never tell them apart. (Over time, Joe could, and wasn’t that all that mattered?)

“The Yokohamas,” as Danny thought of the twins-as if Yokohama were their family name-were undergraduates and part-time waitresses at Mao’s. Therefore, Iowa City had a decidedly Asian flavor not only for the cook but for Danny and young Joe. The twins spoke Japanese to each other, which Joe loved but Danny found distracting. Most nights, when Sao worked at Mao’s, Kaori was Joe’s babysitter-or vice versa. (In which case, no Japanese was spoken.)

The Yokohamas had at first maintained a distant respect for Yi-Yiing, whose ER schedule did not often allow her to coincide in the house with either Sao or Kaori. They were more likely to run into one another at Mao’s, where Yi-Yiing occasionally came late (and by herself) to dinner-though she preferred the all-night shift in the emergency room to working daytime hours.

One night, when Xiao Dee was the maître d’, he mistook Yi-Yiing for one of the waitresses who worked at Mao’s. “You’re late!” he told her.

“I’m a customer-I have a reservation,” Yi-Yiing told Little Brother.

“Oh, shit-you’re Tony’s nurse!” Xiao Dee said.

“Tony’s too young to need a nurse yet,” Yi-Yiing replied.

Later, the cook tried to defend Xiao Dee. (“He’s a good driver-he’s just a shitty maître d’.”) But Yi-Yiing was sensitive.

“The Americans think I’m Vietnamese, and some Shanghai clown from Queens thinks I’m a waitress!” she told Tony.

Unfortunately, one of the Japanese twins, who was a waitress-at this moment, she was also young Joe’s babysitter-overheard Yi-Yiing say this. “What’s so bad about being a waitress?” Sao or Kaori asked the nurse.

The Japanese twins had also been mistaken for Vietnamese war brides in Iowa City. Most people in their native San Francisco, either Sao or Kaori had explained to Danny, could tell the Japanese and Vietnamese apart; apparently this was not the case in the Midwest. To this shameful lumping together, what could Danny truthfully say? After all, he still couldn’t tell Sao and Kaori apart! (And, after Yi-Yiing used the waitress word as an epithet, the Yokohamas’ formerly distant respect for the nurse from Hong Kong grew more distant.)

“We’re all one happy family,” Danny would later try to explain to one of his older workshop students. Youn was a writer from Seoul; she came into Danny’s fiction workshop the second year he was back in Iowa City. There were some Vietnam vets among the workshop students in those years-they, too, were older. And there were a few women writers who’d interrupted their writing lives to get married and have children, and get divorced. These older graduate students had an advantage over the younger writers who’d come to the Writers’ Workshop right out of college; the older ones had something to write about.

Youn certainly did. She’d been a slave to an arranged marriage in Seoul -“virtually arranged,” was how she first described the marriage in the novel she was writing.

Danny had criticized the virtually. “Either it was an arranged marriage or it wasn’t, right?” he’d asked Youn.

Her skin was as pale as milk. Her black hair was cut short, with bangs, under which her big dark-brown eyes made her appear waifish, though Youn was over thirty-she was exactly Danny’s age-and her efforts to get her real-life husband to divorce her, so she wouldn’t be dragged through “the Korean rigmarole” of trying to divorce him, gave her novel-in-progress a labyrinthine plot.

If you could believe either her actual story or her novel, the writer Danny Angel had thought. When he’d first met her, and had read the early chapters, Danny didn’t know if he could trust her-either as a woman or as a writer. But he’d liked her from the beginning, and Danny’s developing attraction to Youn at least alleviated his inappropriate fantasizing about his father’s girlfriend in her countless pairs of pajamas.

“Well,” the cook had said to his son, after Danny introduced him to Youn, “if there’s a Chinese nurse and two Japanese girls in the house, why not a Korean writer, too?”

But they were all hiding something, weren’t they? Certainly, the cook and his son were in hiding-they were fugitives. His dad’s Chinese nurse gave Danny the impression that there was something she wasn’t saying. As for Danny’s Korean writer, he knew she exhibited a seemingly willful lack of clarity-he didn’t mean only in her prose.

There was no fault to be found with the Japanese babysitters, whose affection for young Joe was genuine, and whose fondness for the cook stemmed from the camaraderie of them all working together in the ambitious chaos of Asian and French cuisine at Mao’s.

Not that Yi-Yiing’s rapt attention to Joe was insincere; the ER nurse was a truly good soul. It was her relationship with the cook that amounted to a compromise, perhaps to them both. But Tony Angel had long been wary of women, and he was used to hedging his bets; it was Yi-Yiing who shouldn’t have tolerated Tony’s short-term flings with those traveling women he met at the Writers’ Workshop parties, but the nurse accepted even this from the cook. Yi-Yiing liked living with a young boy the same age as her missing daughter; she liked being a mother to someone. Being a part of the cook’s all-male family may also have struck Yi-Yiing as a bohemian adventure-one she might not find so easy to slip into once her daughter and parents finally joined her in America.

To those bold young doctors at Mercy Hospital who would inquire as to her status-was she married, or did she have a boyfriend? they wanted to know-Yi-Yiing always said, to their surprise, “I live with the writer Danny Angel.” She must have liked saying this, for reasons beyond it being a conversation-stopper, because it was only to her closer friends and acquaintances that Yi-Yiing would bother to add: “Well, actually, I’m dating Danny’s father. He’s a cook at Mao’s-not the Chinese one.” But the cook understood that it was complicated for Yi-Yiing-a woman in her thirties with an unsettled life, living so far away from her native land, and with a daughter she knew only from photographs.

Once, at a party, someone who worked at Mercy Hospital said to Danny, “Oh, I know your girlfriend.”

“What girlfriend?” Danny had asked; this was before Youn came into his fiction workshop, and (before long) had moved into the second house on Court Street.

“Yi-Yiing-she’s Chinese, a nurse at-”

“She’s my dad’s girlfriend,” the writer quickly said.

“Oh-”

“What’s going on with Yi-Yiing?” Danny had later asked his father. “Some people think she’s living with me.”

“I don’t question Yi-Yiing, Daniel. She doesn’t question me,” the cook pointed out. “And isn’t she terrific with Joe?” his dad asked him. Both of them knew very well that this was the same point Danny had made to his father about his former Windham College student Franky, back in Vermont-yet it was strange, nonetheless, Danny thought. Was the cook, who was turning fifty, more of a bohemian than his writer son (at least until Youn moved into that second Court Street house)?

And what was it that was wrong about that house? It had been big enough for them all; that wasn’t it. There were enough bedrooms so that everyone could have slept separately; Youn used one of the extra bedrooms as a place to write, and for all her things. For a woman over thirty who’d had no children and endured an incomprehensible Korean divorce-at least it was “incomprehensible” in her novel-in-progress, or so Danny thought-Youn had remarkably few things. Had she left everything behind in Seoul, not just her truly terrifying-sounding former husband?

“I’m a student,” she’d said to Danny. “That is what is so liberating about being a student again-I don’t have any things.” It was a smart answer, the writer thought, but Danny didn’t know if he believed her.

IN THE FALL OF ’73, when Joe was starting third grade, the cook kept a crate of apples on the back porch of their Iowa City house. The porch overlooked a narrow, paved alley; it ran the length of the long row of houses that fronted Court Street. The alley didn’t appear to be used for anything, except for picking up garbage. Only an occasional slow-moving car passed, and-more often, even constantly-kids on bicycles. There was some loose sand or gravel on the little-used pavement, which meant the kids could practice skids on their bikes. Joe had fallen off his bike in that back alley. Yi-Yiing had cleaned the scrape on the boy’s knee.

A porch, off the kitchen, faced the alley, and something was eating the apples that the cook left out on the porch-a raccoon, Danny at first suspected, but it was a possum, actually, and one early evening when young Joe went out on the porch to fetch an apple for himself, he put his hand in the crate and the possum scared him. It growled or hissed or snarled; the boy was so scared that he couldn’t even say for sure if the primitive-looking animal had bitten him.

All Danny kept asking was, “Did it bite you?” (He couldn’t stop examining Joe’s arms and hands for bite marks.)

“I don’t know!” the boy wailed. “It was white and pink-it looked awful! What was it?”

“A possum,” Danny kept repeating; he’d seen it slink away. Possums were ugly-looking creatures.

That night, when Joe fell asleep, Danny went into the boy’s bedroom and examined him all over. He wished Yi-Yiing was home, but she was working in the ER. She would know if possums were occasionally rabid-in Vermont, raccoons often were-and the good nurse would know what to do if Joe had been bitten, but Danny couldn’t find a bite mark anywhere on his son’s perfect body.

Youn had stood in the open doorway of the boy’s bedroom; she’d watched Danny looking for any indication of an animal bite. “Wouldn’t Joe know if he was bitten?” she asked.

“He was too startled and too scared to know,” Danny answered her. Youn was staring at the sleeping boy as if he were a wild or unknown animal to her, and Danny realized that she often looked at Joe with this puzzled, from-another-world fascination. If Yi-Yiing doted on Joe because she longed to be with her daughter of that same age, Youn looked at Joe with what appeared to be incomprehension; it was as if she’d never been around children of any age before.

Then again, if one could believe her story (or her novel), her success in obtaining a divorce from her husband-most important, in getting him to initiate the allegedly complicated procedure-was due to her failure to get pregnant and have a child. That was her novel’s tortuous plot: how her husband presumed she was trying to get pregnant, when all along she’d been taking birth-control pills and using a diaphragm-she was doing all she could not to get pregnant, and to never have a child.

Youn was writing her novel in English, not Korean, and her English was excellent, Danny thought; her writing was good, though certain Korean elements remained mystifying. (What was Korean divorce law, anyway? Why was the charade of pretending to try to get pregnant necessary? And, according to Youn, she’d hated taking birth-control pills.)

The husband-ultimately, Danny assumed, the ex-husband-in Youn’s novel was a kind of gangster businessman. Perhaps he was a well-paid assassin, or he hired lesser hit men to do his dirty work; in Danny’s reading of Youn’s novel-in-progress, this wasn’t clear. That the husband was dangerous-in both Youn’s real life and her novel-seemed obvious. Danny could only wonder about the sexual detail. There was something sympathetic about the husband, despite Youn’s efforts to demonize him; the poor man imagined it was his fault that his scheming wife couldn’t get pregnant.

It didn’t help that, in bed at night, Youn told Danny the worst details of her miserable marriage-her husband’s tireless need for sex included. (But he was trying to get you pregnant, wasn’t he? Danny wanted to ask, though he didn’t. Maybe sex had felt like a duty to Youn’s unfortunate husband and to Youn. The things she told Danny in the dark and the details of her novels were becoming blurred-or were they interchangeable?)

Shouldn’t the fictional husband, the cold-blooded-killer executive in her novel, have a different name from her actual ex-husband? Danny had asked Youn. What if her former husband ever read her novel? (Assuming she could get it published.) Wouldn’t he then know how she’d deceived him-by deliberately trying not to get pregnant when they were married?

“My previous life is over,” Youn answered him darkly. She did not seem to associate sex with duty now, though Danny couldn’t help but wonder about that, too.

Youn was extraordinarily neat with her few belongings. She even kept her toilet articles in the small bathroom attached to the unused bedroom where she wrote. Her clothes were in the closet of that bedroom, or in the lone chest of drawers that was there. Once, when Youn was out, Danny had looked in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom she used. He saw her birth-control pills-it was an Iowa City prescription.

Danny always used a condom. It was an old habit-and, given his history of occasionally having more than one sexual partner, not a bad one. But Youn had said to him one time, almost casually, “Thank you for using a condom. I’ve taken a lifetime of birth-control pills. I don’t ever want to take them again.”

But she was taking them, wasn’t she? Well, if Danny’s dad didn’t question Yi-Yiing, why should Danny expect answers to everything from Youn? Hadn’t her life been complicated, too?

It was into this careless world of unasked or unanswered questions-not only of an Asian variety, but including some longstanding secrets between the cook and his writer son-that a blue Mustang brought them all to their senses (albeit only momentarily) regarding the fragile, unpredictable nature of things.

ON SATURDAY MORNINGS in the fall, when there was an Iowa home football game, Danny could hear the Iowa band playing-he never knew where. If the band had been practicing in Kinnick Stadium, across the Iowa River and up the hill, could he have heard the music so far away, on Court Street, on the eastern side of town?

That Saturday it was bright and fair, and Danny had tickets to take Joe to the football game. He’d gotten up early and had made the boy pancakes. Friday had been a late night for the cook at Mao’s, and the Saturday night following a home football game would be later. That morning, Danny’s dad was still in bed; so was Yi-Yiing, who’d finished her usual night shift at Mercy Hospital. Danny didn’t expect to see the Pajama Lady before noon. It was Joe’s neighborhood friend Max, an Iowa faculty kid in Joe’s third-grade class at Longfellow Elementary, who’d first referred to Yi-Yiing as the Pajama Lady. (The eight-year-old couldn’t remember Yi-Yiing’s name.)

Danny was washing his and Joe’s breakfast dishes while Joe was playing outside with Max. They were riding their bicycles in the back alley again; they’d taken some apples from the crate on the porch, but not to eat them. The boys were using the apples as slalom gates, Danny would later realize. He liked Max, but the kid rode his bike all over town; it was a source of some friction between Danny and Joe that Joe wasn’t allowed to do this.

Max was a fanatical collector of posters, stickers, and sew-on insignia, all advertising brands of beer. The kid had given dozens of these to Joe, who had Yi-Yiing sew the various insignia on his jean jacket; the stickers were plastered to the fridge, and the posters hung in Joe’s bedroom. It was funny, Danny thought, and totally innocent; after all, the eight-year-olds weren’t drinking the beer.

What Danny would remember foremost about the car was the sudden screech of tires; he saw only a blue blur pass by the kitchen window. The writer ran out on the back porch, where he’d previously thought the only threat to his son was a possum. “Joe!” Danny called, but there was no answer-only the sound of the blue car hitting some trash barrels at the farthest end of the alley.

“Mr. Angel!” Danny heard Max calling; the boy was almost never off his bike, but this time Danny saw him running.

Several of the apples, placed as slalom gates, had been squashed flat in the alley. Danny saw that both boys’ bikes were lying on their sides, off the pavement; Joe lay curled up in a fetal position next to his bike.

Danny could see that Joe was conscious, and he appeared more frightened than hurt. “Did it hit you? Did the car hit you?” he asked his son. The boy quickly shook his head but otherwise wouldn’t move; he just stayed in a tight ball.

“We crashed, trying to get out of the way-the Mustang was coming right at us,” Max said. “It was the blue Mustang-it always goes too fast,” Max told Danny. “It’s gotta be a customized job-it’s a funny blue.”

“You’ve seen the car before?” Danny asked. (Clearly, Max knew cars.)

“Yeah, but not here-not in the alley,” the boy said.

“Go get the Pajama Lady, Max,” Danny told the kid. “You can find her. She’s upstairs, with my pop.” Danny had never called his dad a “pop” before; where the word came from must have had something to do with the fright of the moment. He knelt beside Joe, almost afraid to touch him, while the boy shivered. He was like a fetus willing himself back to the womb, or trying to, the writer thought. “Joe?” his father said. “Does anything hurt? Is anything broken? Can you move?”

“I couldn’t see a driver. It was just a car,” the boy said-still not moving, except for the shivering. Probably the sunlight had been reflecting off the windshield, Danny thought.

“Some teenager, I’ll bet,” Danny said.

“There was no driver,” Joe insisted. Later Max would claim to have never seen the driver, though he’d seen the speeding blue Mustang in the neighborhood before.

“Pajama Lady!” Danny heard Max calling. “Pop!”

The cook had sat up in bed beside the drowsy Yi-Yiing. “Who’s ‘Pop,’ do you suppose?” he asked her.

“I’m guessing that I’m the Pajama Lady,” Yi-Yiing answered sleepily. “You must be Pop.”

Quite a commotion ensued when Yi-Yiing and the cook learned that Joe had fallen off his bike and there’d been a car involved. Max would probably take to his grave the image of how fast the Pajama Lady ran barefoot to the scene of the accident, where Joe was now sitting up-rocking back and forth in his father’s arms. The cook, with his limp, was slower to arrive; by then, Youn had interrupted her novel-in-progress to see what was the matter.

The elegantly dressed dame at the farthest end of the alley-her trash barrels had been knocked over by the vanishing blue Mustang-approached fearfully. She was elderly and frail, but she wanted to see if the boys on their bicycles were all right. Like Max, the regal old woman had seen the blue Mustang in the neighborhood before-but never the driver.

“What kind of blue?” Danny asked her.

“Not a common blue-it’s too blue,” the old dame said.

“It’s a customized job, Mr. Angel-I told you,” Max said.

“You’re all right, you’re all right,” Yi-Yiing kept saying to Joe; she was feeling the boy all over. “You never hit your head, did you?” she asked him; he shook his head. Then she began to tickle him, maybe to relieve them both. Her Hong Kong pajamas this morning were an iridescent fish-scale green.

“Everything’s fine, isn’t it?” Youn asked Danny. The Korean divorcée probably wanted to get back to her writing.

No, everything isn’t “fine,” the writer Danny Angel was thinking-not with the driverless blue Mustang on the loose-but he smiled at her (Youn was also barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and jeans) and at his worried-looking father. The cook must have limped naked into the upstairs hall before he realized he lacked clothes, because he was wearing just a pair of Danny’s running shorts; Danny had left them on the railing at the top of the stairs.

“Are you taking a run, Pop?” Danny asked his dad, the new word seeming strangely natural to them both-as if a bullet dodged marked a turning point, or a new beginning, in both their lives and young Joe’s. Maybe it did.

COLBY WAS THE COP’S NAME. “Officer Colby,” the cook kept calling him, in the kitchen of the Court Street house-perhaps in mock respect of that other, long-ago policeman in his life. Except for the bad haircut, the young Iowa City cop in no way resembled Carl. Colby was fair-skinned with Scandinavian-blue eyes and a neatly trimmed blond mustache; he apologized for not responding sooner to Danny’s call about the dangerous driver, but those weekends when the Iowa football team played at home kept the local police busy. The policeman’s demeanor was at once friendly and earnest-Danny liked him immediately. (The writer could not help but observe how observant the policeman was; Colby had an eye for small details, such as those beer stickers on the fridge.) Officer Colby told Danny and his dad that he’d received previous reports of a blue Mustang; as Max had said, the car was probably a customized job, but there were some inconsistencies in the various sightings.

The hood ornament was either the original mustang or-according to a hysterical housewife in the parking lot of a supermarket near Fairchild and Dodge-an obscene version of a centaur. Other witnesses identified a nonspecific but clearly out-of-state license plate, while a university student who’d been run off Dubuque Street on his motorcycle said that the blue Mustang definitely had Iowa plates. As Officer Colby told the cook and his writer son, there were no descriptions of the driver.

“The boys will be home from school any minute,” Danny said to the cop, who’d politely glanced at his watch. “You can talk to them. I saw nothing but an unusual shade of blue.”

“May I see your son’s room?” the officer asked.

A curious request, Danny thought, but he saw no reason to object. It took only a minute, and Colby made no comment on the beer posters; the three men returned to the kitchen to wait for the kids. As for the back alley, where the blue Mustang had almost hit the boys on their bikes, Officer Colby pronounced it safe for bike-riding “under normal circumstances.” However, the officer seemed to share Yi-Yiing’s overall feelings about kids on bicycles in Iowa City. It was better for the kids to walk, or take the bus-certainly they should avoid riding their bikes downtown. There were more and more students driving, many of them newcomers to the university town-not to mention the out-of-towners on the big sports weekends.

“Joe doesn’t ride his bike downtown-only in this neighborhood-and he always walks his bike across the street,” Danny told the policeman, who looked as if he doubted this. “No, really,” the writer said. “I’m not so sure about Max, our neighbor’s eight-year-old. I think Max’s parents are more liberal-I mean concerning where Max can ride his bike.”

“Here they are,” the cook said; he’d been watching the back alley for Joe and Max to appear on their bicycles.

The eight-year-olds seemed surprised to see Officer Colby in the kitchen; like the third graders they were, and almost as if they were passing a secret message in class, they looked quickly at each other and then stared at the kitchen floor.

“The beer-truck boys,” Colby said. “Maybe you boys should keep in mind that the blue Mustang has been seen all over town.” The officer turned his attention to Danny and his dad. “They’re good kids, but they like getting beer stickers and posters and those sew-on badges from the beer-truck drivers. I see these boys at the bars downtown. I just remind them that they can’t go inside the bars, and I occasionally have to tell them not to follow the beer trucks from bar to bar-not on their bikes. Clinton and Burlington streets are particularly bad for bikes.”

Joe couldn’t look at his dad or grandfather. “The beer-truck boys,” the cook repeated.

“I gotta go home,” Max said; he was that quickly gone.

“When I see these boys in City Park,” Colby went on, “I tell them I hope they’re not riding their bikes on Dubuque Street. It’s safer to take the footbridge behind the student union, and ride their bikes along the Hancher side of the river. But I suppose it takes you longer to get to the park or the zoo that way-doesn’t it?” Officer Colby asked Joe. The boy just nodded his head; he knew he’d been busted.

Very early the next morning, when Youn was sound asleep and Yi-Yiing hadn’t yet come home from her night shift at Mercy Hospital, Danny went into Joe’s bedroom and observed the eight-year-old asleep in what amounted to a shrine to various brands of beer. “Wake up,” he said to his son, shaking him gently.

“It’s too early for school, isn’t it?” Joe asked.

“Maybe you’ll miss school this morning,” his father said. “We’ll just tell the school you’re sick.”

“But I feel fine,” the boy said.

“Get up and get dressed, Joe-you’re not fine,” his dad told him. “You’re dead-you’ve already died.”

They left the house without having any breakfast, walking down to Muscatine Avenue. In the early morning, there was always traffic on Muscatine, which turned into Iowa Avenue, a divided highway with a grassy median strip separating the driving lanes of the two-way street.

When Joe had been a baby and a toddler, and Danny had lived with Katie in a duplex apartment on Iowa Avenue, the young couple had complained about the noise of the traffic on the street; the residences (among them, an especially rowdy sorority house nearer the campus and downtown) were then slightly upscale off-campus housing for graduate students or well-to-do undergraduates. But in the fall of ’73, when Danny walked to Iowa Avenue with his third-grade son, the houses along the divided, tree-lined street were even more pricey; junior faculty, and probably some tenured faculty, lived there. “Isn’t this the street where you lived with Mom?” Joe asked his dad, as they walked toward the campus and downtown.

“Where we lived with Mom, you mean-yes, it is,” Danny said. Somewhere between the intersections with Johnson and Gilbert streets, the writer recognized the gray-clapboard, two-story house-the bottom floor of which had been the apartment he’d shared with Katie and their little boy. The house had since been repainted-there’d been pale-yellow clapboards in the late sixties-and it was probably a single-family dwelling now.

“The gray one?” Joe asked, because his dad had stopped walking on the sidewalk in front of the house, which was on the downtown-heading-traffic side of the street. The cars veering off Muscatine onto Iowa Avenue were more numerous now.

“Yes, the gray one,” Danny said; he turned his back on the house and faced the avenue. He noticed that the plantings in the median strip had been prettified in the six years since he’d moved away from Iowa Avenue.

“Grandpa said you didn’t like Iowa Avenue -that you wouldn’t even drive on the street,” Joe said to his dad.

“That’s right, Joe,” Danny said. Standing close together, they just watched the traffic going by.

“What’s wrong? Am I grounded?” the boy asked his dad.

“No, you’re not grounded-you’re already dead,” his father told him. Danny pointed to the street. “You died out there, in the road. It was the spring of ’67. You were still in diapers-you were only two.”

“Was I hit by a car?” Joe asked his dad.

“You should have been,” his father answered. “But if you’d really been hit by a car, I would have died, too.”

There was one driver in the outbound lane who would see them standing on the other side of Iowa Avenue -Yi-Yiing, on her way back to Court Street from Mercy Hospital. In the incoming lane, one of Danny’s colleagues at the Writers’ Workshop, the poet Marvin Bell, drove by them and honked his horn. But neither father nor son acknowledged him.

Perhaps Danny and Joe weren’t really standing on the sidewalk, facing the traffic; maybe they were back in the spring of 1967. At least the writer Daniel Baciagalupo, who’d not yet chosen a nom de plume, was back there. It often seemed to Danny that he’d never really left that moment in time.

IN AVELLINO, LORETTA BROUGHT the writer his surprise first course. In the something-from-Asia category, the cook had prepared Ah Gou’s beef satay with peanut sauce for his son; the beef was grilled on wooden skewers. There was assorted tempura, too-shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. Loretta also brought Danny chopsticks, but she hesitated before handing them over. “Do you use these? I can’t remember,” she said. (The writer knew she was lying.)

“Sure, I use them,” he told her.

Loretta still held on to the chopsticks. “You know what? You’re alone too much,” she told him.

“I am alone too much,” Danny said. They flirted with each other, but that was as far as it ever went; it was simply awful, for both of them, to contemplate sleeping with each other when Loretta’s mom and Danny’s dad were sleeping together, too.

Whenever Danny had considered it, he’d imagined Loretta saying, “That would be too much like being brother and sister, or something!”

“What are you writing?” Loretta asked him; as long as she held the chopsticks, he would keep looking at her, she thought.

“Just some dialogue,” Danny told her.

“Like we’re having?” she asked.

“No, it’s… different,” he said. Loretta could tell when she’d lost his attention; she gave him the chopsticks. The way the notebook was open on the table, Loretta could have read the dialogue Danny was writing, but he seemed edgy about it, and she decided not to be pushy.

“Well, I hope you like the surprise,” she told him.

The cook knew it was what Danny had ordered at Mao’s-maybe a hundred times. “Tell Dad it’s the perfect choice,” Danny said, as Loretta was leaving.

He glanced once at the dialogue he had written in the notebook. Danny wanted the line to be very literal-the way an eight-year-old would phrase a question to his father, carefully. (“Why would you have died, too-if I’d really been hit by a car?” the writer had written.)

Dot and May, who were still waiting for their pizzas, had watched everything between Danny and Loretta. It totally killed them that they hadn’t been able to hear their dialogue. “The waitress wants to fuck him, but there’s a problem,” Dot said.

“Yeah, he’s more interested in what he’s writin!” May said.

“What’s he eatin’?” Dot asked her old friend.

“It’s somethin’ on a stick,” May said. “It doesn’t look very appetizin’.”

“I get the feelin’ our pizzas are gonna be disappointin’,” Dot told her.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised,” May said.

“Now look at him!” Dot whispered. “He’s got food in front of him, and he still can’t stop writin’!”

But the food was good; Danny liked most of his memories of Mao’s, and he’d liked all the food there. The dialogue he’d written was also good-it would work fine, Danny had decided. It was just that the timing was wrong, and he wanted to remind himself of the right time to use the line. Before turning his attention to the beef satay, the writer simply circled the dialogue and wrote a note to himself in the margin of the notebook.

“Not now,” Danny wrote. “Tell the part about the pig roast first.”

CHAPTER 10. LADY SKY

SPRING WAS A BIG DEAL IN IOWA; THE FIELDS WERE A SPECIAL green. Pig roasts were the rage with the art-department types and the writing students. Danny had avoided most of the Writers’ Workshop parties when he’d been a student, but Katie dragged him to the artists’ parties, which in Danny’s opinion were worse than whatever trouble the writers managed to cause themselves. Katie knew everyone in the Iowa art department, because of her modeling for the life-drawing classes; though he’d been a life-drawing model in New Hampshire, Danny hadn’t been married at the time. In Iowa, it made him uncomfortable to know that many of the graduate students in art-not to mention some of the faculty-had seen his wife naked. Danny didn’t know most of their names.

This particular pig roast had been hard to find. Little Joe cried the whole way to Tiffin on U.S. 6, but Danny, who was driving, wouldn’t let Katie take the two-year-old out of his car seat. They left the highway in Tiffin but were nearer to North Liberty when they got lost; either Buffalo Creek Road didn’t exist, or it wasn’t marked, and by the time they found the dilapidated farmhouse, Danny had spoken sarcastically on the subject of art students. (They were either too nonverbal or too abstract to give good directions, in his opinion.)

“What do you care if we can’t find the stupid farm?” Katie had asked him. “You never want to go to the parties I’m invited to, anyway.”

“I never want to go to the parties I’m invited to, either,” he pointed out to her.

“Which makes you loads of fun, fuckhead,” Katie said.

The farmer tended to his pigs in the early morning, and once again in the late afternoon; he lived in one of those motel-looking but expensive ranch houses on Rochester Avenue in Iowa City, and he rented his falling-apart farmhouse to four scruffy young men who were graduate students in art. Katie called them artists-as if they’d already achieved something.

The writer was more cynically inclined; Danny thought of the male graduate students on the pig farm as three half-assed painters and one pretentious photographer. Though Danny did know that the half-assed painters had all drawn Katie in one or another life-drawing class, he hadn’t known that the pretentious photographer had photographed her in the nude-this unwelcome news had emerged in the car, when they got lost on their way to the pig roast-and Danny had been unprepared for the drawings and photos of his naked wife in the graduate students’ untidy farmhouse.

Joe didn’t seem to recognize his mother in the first of the sketches the two-year-old saw; in the farmhouse kitchen and dining room, some smudged charcoal drawings of Katie were taped to the walls. “Nice decor,” Danny said to his wife. Katie shrugged. Danny saw that someone had already given her a glass of wine. He hoped there was beer; Danny was always the driver, and he drove a little better on beer.

In the car, he’d said to his wife: “I didn’t know that the life-drawing classes were open to photographers.”

“They aren’t,” Katie had told him. “It was arranged outside class.”

“Arranged,” he’d repeated.

“God, now you’re repeating everything,” she’d said, “like your fucking father.”

While Danny looked in vain for a beer in the refrigerator, Joe told him that he needed to go to the bathroom. Danny knew that Joe wasn’t yet toilet-trained. When the boy said he needed to go to the bathroom, he meant that it was time for someone to change his diaper.

Katie usually resented carrying diapers in her purse, but she had wanted to go to the pig roast badly enough that she hadn’t complained-until now. “It’s about time the two-year-old was house-broken, isn’t it?” she said to Danny, handing him a clean diaper. Katie called Joe the two-year-old as if the boy’s age condemned him to denigration.

In the downstairs bathroom of the farmhouse, there was no curtain for the shower stall, and the bathroom floor was wet. Father and son both washed their hands in the grimy sink, but finding a towel was no more successful an endeavor than Danny’s search for a beer. “We can wave our hands dry,” Danny said to the boy, who waved to his dad as if he were saying good-bye-the standard one-handed wave.

“Try waving both hands, Joe.”

“Look-Mommy!” the boy said. He was pointing to the photographs on the wall behind his father. There was a black-and-white contact sheet and half a dozen enlargements thumbtacked to the wall above the empty towel rack. Katie was naked with her hands hiding her small breasts, but her crotch was fully exposed; it looked as if her modesty had been purposely manipulated or misplaced. Someone’s conscious idea, clearly-a deliberate statement, but of what? Danny wondered. And had it been Katie’s idea or the photographer’s? (His name was Rolf-he was one of the bearded ones, Danny only now remembered.)

“Yes, the lady looks a lot like Mommy,” Danny said, but this strategy backfired. Joe looked more closely at the photos, frowning.

“It is Mommy,” the boy said.

“You think?” his dad asked. He’d taken his son’s small hand and was leading him out of the filthy bathroom.

“Yes, it’s really Mommy,” Joe answered gravely.

Danny poured himself a glass of red wine; there were no wineglasses left, so he used a milk glass. There were no plastic cups, either. In one of the kitchen cabinets, he found a coffee mug that looked sturdy enough-if not completely childproof-and he gave Joe some ginger ale. Danny wouldn’t have trusted any milk in the fridge, if he’d been able to find some, and the ginger ale was the only mixer there that could possibly appeal to a child.

The party was outside on the lawn, near the pigpen. Given the late-afternoon, early-evening time of day, Danny assumed that the farmer had already fed his pigs for the day and departed. At least the pigs looked contented, though they watched the assembled partygoers with almost human curiosity; on an average day, the pigs probably didn’t get to observe a dozen or more artists.

Danny noted that there were no other children at the party-not too many married couples, either. “Are there any faculty here?” he asked Katie, who’d already refilled her wineglass-or someone had. He knew Katie had been hoping that Roger would come. Roger was the faculty member who taught the graduate classes in life drawing; he was the life-drawing instructor Katie was sleeping with at the time. Katie would still be sleeping with Roger when she told Danny she was leaving, but that event was a couple of days away.

“I thought Roger would be here, but he isn’t,” Katie said with disappointment. She was standing next to Rolf, the bearded photographer; Danny realized she’d actually been speaking to him, not Danny. Roger also had a beard, Danny recalled. He knew Katie was sleeping with Roger, but it only now occurred to him that she might be sleeping with Rolf, too. Maybe she was going through a beard phase, the writer imagined. Looking at Rolf, Danny wondered how and where they had arranged the photographs.

“Nice pictures,” Danny told him.

“Oh, you saw them,” Rolf said casually.

“You’re all over the place,” Danny said to Katie, who just shrugged.

“Did you see your mom?” Rolf asked Joe, bending down to the boy, as if he thought the child were hard of hearing.

“He barely talks,” Katie said, which was totally untrue; Joe was exceptionally articulate for a two-year-old, as only children tend to be. (Maybe because he was a writer, Danny talked to the boy all the time.)

“Mommy’s right there,” the boy said, pointing at her.

“No, I meant the pictures,” Rolf explained. “They’re in the bathroom.”

“That’s Mommy,” Joe insisted, pointing to his mother again.

“See what I mean?” Katie asked the photographer.

Danny didn’t yet know about Katie’s plan to save another stupid boy from the war in Vietnam; that revelation was also a couple of days away. But when Danny did learn of Katie’s intentions, he would remember Rolf’s attempt to communicate with little Joe that day at the pig farm. While Rolf certainly seemed stupid enough to need saving, the beard didn’t fit with Danny’s image of the boy word. Danny would never know the boy who became Katie’s next Kennedy father, but the writer somehow didn’t picture him with a beard.

The three graduate-student painters were circling the fire pit, where the pig was roasting. Danny and Joe were standing nearby.

“We started the fucking fire before dawn,” one of the painters said to Danny.

“The pig isn’t done yet,” another painter said; he also had a beard, which made Danny regard him closely.

They had built a wood fire-according to the bearded painter, “a roaring big one”-and when it was reduced to coals, they’d lowered the springs for a double-bed mattress into the pit. (They’d found the bedsprings in the barn, and the farmer had assured them that the stuff in the barn was junk.) They’d put the pig on the red-hot bedsprings, but now they had no way of getting more wood under the bedsprings and the pig. When they’d tried to raise the bedsprings, the pig started to fall apart. Because of how utterly destroyed the roasting pig looked, Danny thought better of calling it to little Joe’s attention-not when there were live pigs present. (Not that the mess on the smoking bed-springs remotely resembled an actual pig-not anymore. Joe didn’t know what it was.)

“We’ll just have to wait until the pig is done,” the third painter told Danny philosophically.

Joe held tightly to his dad’s hand. The boy didn’t venture near the smoldering fire pit; it was bad enough that there was a hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it.

“Want to look at the pigs?” Joe asked, pulling on his father’s hand.

“Okay,” Danny said.

It seemed that the pigs in the pen were unaware that one of their own was roasting; they just kept staring through the slats of the fence at all the people. Every Iowan Danny had met said you had to watch yourself around pigs. Supposedly, pigs were very smart, but the older ones could be dangerous.

The writer wondered how you could tell the older pigs from the younger ones-just by their size, perhaps. But all the pigs in the pen seemed huge. That must have been a suckling pig in the fire pit, Danny thought, a relatively small one, not one of these enormous creatures.

“What do you think of them?” Danny asked little Joe.

“Big pigs!” the boy answered.

“Right,” his dad said. “Big pigs. Don’t touch them, because they bite. Don’t stick your hands through the fence, okay?”

“They bite,” the boy repeated solemnly.

“You won’t get close to them, okay?” his father asked.

“Okay,” Joe said.

Danny looked back at the three painters standing around the smoldering fire pit. They weren’t watching the cooking pig-they were staring at the sky. Danny glanced up at the sky, too. A small plane had appeared on the horizon to the north of the pig farm. It was still gaining altitude-the sound probably wouldn’t reach them for a little while. The pig farm was due south of Cedar Rapids, where there was an airport; perhaps the plane had taken off from there.

“Plane. Not a bird,” Danny heard Joe say; the boy was also watching the sky.

“A plane, yes. Not a bird,” his dad repeated.

Rolf passed by, refilling Danny’s milk glass with red wine. “There’s beer, you know-I saw some in a tub of ice somewhere,” the photographer said. “You drink beer, don’t you?”

Danny wondered how Rolf knew that; Katie must have told him. He watched the photographer bring the bottle of wine over to Katie. Without looking up at the airplane, Rolf pointed at the sky with the wine bottle, and Katie began to watch the small plane. Now you could hear it, though it was very high in the sky-too high to be a crop duster, Danny was guessing.

Rolf was whispering in Katie’s ear while Katie watched the plane. Something’s going on, the writer thought, but Danny was thinking that something was going on with Katie and Rolf-he wasn’t thinking about the plane. Then Danny noticed that the three painters at the fire pit were whispering to one another; they were all watching the plane, too.

Joe wanted to be picked up-maybe the size of the pigs had intimidated him. Two of the pigs were a muddy pink, but the rest had black splotches. “They look like pink-and-black cows,” Danny said to Joe.

“No, they’re pigs. Not cows,” the boy told him.

“Okay,” Danny said. Katie was coming over to them.

“Look at the pigs, Mommy,” Joe said.

“Yuck,” she said. “Keep watching the plane,” Katie told her husband. She was going away again, but not before Danny caught the scent of marijuana; the smell must have clung to her hair. He’d not seen her smoking any pot-not even one toke-but while he’d been changing Joe’s diaper, she must have had some. “Tell the kid to keep his eyes on the airplane,” Katie said, still walking away. It sounded wrong, how Katie called Joe the kid, Danny was thinking. It was as if the boy were someone else’s kid-that’s how it sounded.

THE LITTLE PLANE wasn’t climbing anymore; it had leveled off and was now directly above the farm, but still high in the sky. It appeared to have slowed down, perfectly suspended above them, almost not moving. “We’re supposed to watch the airplane,” Danny told his small son, kissing the boy’s neck, but Danny watched his wife instead. She had joined the painters at the smoking fire pit; Rolf was with them. They were watching the plane with anticipation, but because Danny was watching them, he missed the moment.

“Not a bird,” he heard little Joe say. “Not flying. Falling!”

By the time Danny looked up, he couldn’t be sure-at such a height-exactly what had fallen from the plane, but it was dropping down fast, straight at them. When the parachute opened, the painters and Rolf cheered. (The asshole artists had hired a skydiver for entertainment, Danny was thinking.)

“What’s coming down?” Joe asked his dad.

“A skydiver,” Danny told the boy.

“A what in the sky?” the two-year-old said.

“A person with a parachute,” Danny said, but this made no sense to little Joe.

“A what?”

“A parachute keeps the person from falling too fast-the person is going to be all right,” Danny was explaining, but Joe clung tightly to his father’s neck. Danny smelled the marijuana before he realized that Katie was standing next to them.

“Just wait-keep watching,” she said, floating away again.

“A sky something,” Joe was saying. “A para-what?”

“A skydiver, a parachute,” Danny repeated. Joe just stared, open-mouthed, as the parachute drifted down to them. It was a big parachute, the colors of the American flag.

The skydiver’s breasts were the first giveaway. “It’s a lady,” little Joe said.

“Yes, it is,” his father replied.

“What happened to her clothes?” Joe asked.

Now everyone was watching, even the pigs. Danny hadn’t noticed when the pigs began to be aware of the parachutist, but they were aware of her now. They must not have been used to flying people dropping down on them-or used to the giant descending parachute, which now cast a shadow over their pigpen.

“Lady Sky!” Joe screamed, pointing up at the naked skydiver.

When the first pig squealed and started to run, the other pigs all snorted and ran. That may have been when Lady Sky saw where she was going to land-in the pigpen. The angry skydiver began to swear.

By then, even the drunk and the stoned could see that she was naked. Fucking art students! Danny was thinking. Of course they couldn’t just hire a skydiver; naturally, she had to be a nude. Katie looked unconcerned-quite possibly, she was jealous. Once she realized the skydiver was naked, maybe Katie wished that she could be the skydiver. Katie probably didn’t like having another nude model at the art students’ pig roast.

“Christ, she’s going to end up in the fucking pigpen!” Rolf was saying. Had he only now noticed? He must have been the one who was smoking dope with Katie. (Rolf was definitely stupid enough to need saving-if not from the war in Vietnam, Danny would one day find himself thinking.)

“Hold him,” Danny said to his wife, handing little Joe to Katie.

The furious naked woman passed overhead. Danny jumped and tried to grab her feet, but she drifted just above and beyond his reach, swearing as she went. For all of them on the ground, people and pigs, a traveling vagina had hovered over them-descending.

“Someone should tell her that’s an unflattering angle, if you’re a woman and you’re naked,” Katie was saying. Probably to Rolf-her remark wouldn’t have made any sense to Joe. (Katie never had much to say to the kid, anyway.)

It was very muddy in the pigpen, but Danny had run in mud before-he knew you had to keep your feet moving. He paid no attention to where the pigs were; he could tell by the way the ground shook that they were also running. Danny just followed the drifting woman. When her heels struck the ground, she slid through the shitty mud with her chute collapsing after her. She fell on one hip and the chute dragged her sideways, on her stomach, before Danny could catch up to her. She was almost as surprised to see him as they both were shocked by the awful smell, and by how big the pigs were when they were this close to them. There was also the constant grunting. One of the pigs trampled over the parachute, but the feel of the chute, under its hooves, appeared to panic the animal; it veered, squealing, away from them.

She was a big skydiver, of Amazonian proportions-a virtual giantess. Danny couldn’t have carried her out of the pen, but he saw how she was trying to free herself from the harness that attached her to the parachute, which was hard to drag through the muck, and Danny was able to help her with that. The naked skydiver was covered with pig shit and mud. The back of one of Danny’s hands brushed against her dirty nipple as he struggled with the strap of the harness that divided her breasts. Danny only then realized that he’d fallen a few times; he was spattered with pig shit and mud, too.

“No one told me it was a fucking pig farm!” the skydiver said. She had closely cropped hair, and she’d shaved her pubic hair, leaving just a vertical strip, but she was a strawberry blonde, top to bottom.

“They’re a bunch of asshole artists-I had nothing to do with this,” Danny told her.

From her scar, he could see she’d had a cesarean section. She looked a decade older than Danny, in her thirties, maybe. Evidently, she’d been a bodybuilder. Her tattoos were indiscernible in the muck, but she was definitely not the nude the art students had been imagining; maybe she was more than they’d bargained for, the writer hoped.

“My name’s Danny,” he told her.

“Amy,” she said. “Thanks.”

When she was freed from the chute, Danny put his hand on the small of her back and pushed her ahead of him. “Run to the fence-just keep running,” he told her. He kept his hand against her damp skin the whole way. A pig blundered past them as if it were racing them, not chasing them. Possibly it was running away from them. They almost collided with another pig, this one running in the opposite direction. Perhaps it was the parachute that had upset the pigs-not the naked lady.

“Lady Sky!” Danny could hear Joe shouting.

Someone else started yelling it: “Lady Sky!”

“Be sure you show me the asshole artists,” Amy said, when they reached the perimeter of the pigpen. She needed no help getting over the fence. Danny was looking all around for Joe, but the little boy wasn’t with Katie; he saw his wife standing with Rolf and the three painters.

“Those are the four guys you want,” Danny told Amy, pointing to them. “The ones with the small woman, but not the woman-she wasn’t in on it. Just the two guys with the beards, and the two without.”

“This pig doesn’t bite,” Danny thought he heard his son say in a quiet, contemplative voice.

“Joe!” the writer called.

“I’m right here, Daddy.”

That was when Danny realized that little Joe was in the pigpen with him. The boy stood next to one of the pink-and-black pigs; it must have been running, because it was clearly out of breath, though it stood very still. Only its harsh breathing made the big pig move at all-except for the way it inclined its head toward the boy, who had hold of the animal’s ear. Maybe it felt good to a pig to have its ear rubbed or gently pulled. In any case, the more the two-year-old stroked its ear, the more the pig tilted its head and lowered its long ear in Joe’s direction.

“Pigs have funny ears,” the boy said.

“Joe, get out of the pen-right now,” his dad said. He must have raised his voice more than he’d meant to; the pig snapped its head in Danny’s direction, as if it deeply resented the ear-rubbing interruption. Only a low-to-the-ground feeding trough separated them, and the pig hunched its shoulders on either side of its huge head and squinted at him. Danny stood his ground until he saw Joe climb safely through the slats in the fence.

The drama with the skydiver, and then with Joe, prevented Danny from seeing how low in the sky the small plane had circled. The pilot and copilot probably wanted to be sure that Amy had touched down without mishap, but Amy gave the plane the finger-both fingers, in fact-and the plane dipped a wing to her, as if in salutation, then flew off in the direction of Cedar Rapids.

“Welcome to Buffalo Creek Farm,” Rolf had said to the skydiver. Regrettably, Danny missed seeing this part, too-how Amy had grabbed the photographer by both his shoulders, snapped him toward her, and head-butted him in his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Rolf staggered backward, falling several feet from the spot where Amy had made contact.

She knocked down the painter with the beard with a left jab followed by a right hook. “I don’t jump into pigs!” she shouted at the two painters left standing.

Both Danny and Joe saw the next bit. “Which one of you artists is going to get my parachute?” she asked them, pointing to the pigpen. By now, the pigs had calmed down; they’d returned to the fence and were once more observing the artistic crowd, their snouts poking through the slats. The pig whose ear had been stroked, to its apparent satisfaction, was now indistinguishable from the others. Way out in the muck, the trampled red-white-and-blue parachute lay like a flag fallen in battle.

“The farmer told us never to go in the pigpen,” one of the graduate-student painters began.

Danny carried Joe over to Katie. “You were supposed to hold him,” he said to her.

“He peed all over me when you went into the pigpen,” Katie said.

“He has a diaper on,” Danny told her.

“I could still feel how wet he was,” she said.

“You weren’t even watching him,” Danny told her.

Amy had the painter who’d spoken up in a headlock. “I’ll get your fucking parachute,” Katie suddenly told her.

“You can’t go in there,” Danny said.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do, hero,” she said.

Katie had always been competitive that way. First the nude sky-diver had taken the art students’ attention away from her; then her husband’s act of bravado had upstaged her. But of course what Katie really wanted to do was undress. “I’ll just keep the pig shit off my clothes, if you don’t object,” she said to Danny; she began handing her clothes to the one painter who’d been untouched by the shit-smeared skydiver. “I would give them to you,” she told Danny, “but you’re covered with shit-you should see yourself.”

“It wouldn’t be good if something happened to you in front of Joe,” Danny started to tell her.

“Why?” she asked him. “A two-year-old won’t remember it. Only you will-you fuckhead writer.”

Seeing her naked and defiant made Danny realize that what had once attracted him to Katie now repelled him. He’d mistaken what was brazen about her for a kind of sexual courage; she’d seemed both sexy and progressive, but Katie was merely vulgar and insecure. What Danny had desired in his wife only filled him now with revulsion-and this had taken a mere two years to transpire. (The loving-her part would last a little longer; neither Danny nor any other writer could ever explain that.)

HE’D CARRIED JOE BACK to the downstairs bathroom so that they could clean up, or try to. (Danny didn’t want Joe to see his naked mother devoured by a pig; surely the two-year-old would remember that, if only for a little while.)

“Is Mommy giving Lady Sky her clothes?” Joe asked.

“Mommy’s clothes wouldn’t fit Lady Sky, sweetie,” Danny answered his son.

Amy didn’t want any clothes; she told the asshole artists that all she wanted was a bath. The pilot and copilot were bringing her clothes-“or they better be,” the skydiver said.

“I hope your bathroom is cleaner than ours,” Danny said to Amy, as she was following the unassaulted painter up the farmhouse stairs.

“I’m not counting on it,” Amy told him. “Was that your wife-that little thing who was going to fetch my parachute?” the skydiver called down the stairs to Danny.

“Yes,” he answered her.

“She’s got balls, hasn’t she?” Amy asked him.

“Yes-that’s Katie,” Danny said.

He’d forgotten that there wasn’t a towel in the downstairs bathroom, but getting the pig shit off himself and little Joe was what mattered. Who cared if they were wet? Besides, the boy’s clothes had somehow managed to stay clean; Joe’s pants were a little damp, because he’d really peed like crazy in his diaper.

“I guess you liked that ginger ale, huh?” Danny asked the boy. He’d also forgotten to ask Katie for a dry diaper, but that didn’t really matter as much as getting the pig shit off little Joe’s hands. There was shit all over Danny and his clothes-his running shoes were ruined. If his wife could take off all her clothes, Danny guessed that no one would mind if he wore just his boxers for the remainder of the artists’ party. It was a sunny spring day-April in Iowa -warm enough to be wearing only a pair of boxers.

“You call this a clean towel?” the skydiver was shouting.

Danny undressed himself and little Joe, and they both got into the shower. There was no soap, but they used a lot of shampoo instead. They were still in the shower when Katie came into the downstairs bathroom, carrying her clothes and a towel. She was not as shit-spattered as Danny had expected.

“If you don’t try to run in that muck, you don’t fall down, fuckhead.”

“So you just walked out to the parachute, and walked back?” Danny asked her. “The pigs didn’t bother you?”

“The pigs were spooked by the chute,” Katie said. “Move over-both of you.” She got into the shower with them, and Danny shampooed her hair.

“Mommy got pig poo on her, too?” Joe asked.

“Everyone’s got pig poo on them somewhere,” Katie said.

They took turns with the towel, and Danny put a dry diaper on Joe. He dressed the little boy before putting on his boxers. “That’s all you’re wearing?” Katie asked him.

“I’m donating the rest of my clothes to the farm,” Danny told her. “In fact, I’m not touching them-they’re staying right there,” he said, pointing to the pile of clothes on the wet floor. Katie threw her bra and panties on the pile. She slipped into her jeans; you could see her breasts through the white blouse she was wearing-her nipples, especially.

“Is that all you’re wearing?” Danny asked her.

Katie shrugged. “I guess I can donate my underwear to the farm, if I want to,” she said.

“Is everything a contest, Katie?”

But she didn’t answer him. She opened the bathroom door and left them with the pile of clothes and Danny’s discarded running shoes. “I lost my sandals somewhere,” she told them.

Outside, the skydiver was wearing just a towel around her waist and was drinking a beer. “Where’d you find the beer?” Danny asked her. He’d already had too much wine on an empty stomach.

Amy showed him the tub of ice. Rolf was sitting on the ground beside the tub, repeatedly dunking his face in the icy water. There was blood from his nose everywhere. He had a pretty good gash on one eyebrow, too-all from the head-butt. Danny took out two beers, wiping the necks of the bottles on his boxers. “That was a terrific idea, Rolf,” Danny told the photographer. “Too bad she didn’t land in the fire pit.”

“Shit,” Rolf said, standing up. He looked a little unsteady on his feet. “No one’s watching the pig in the pit-we got distracted by all the heroics.”

“Is there an opener?” Danny asked him.

“There’s one in the kitchen somewhere,” Rolf answered. The bearded painter who’d been hit with Amy’s jab and hook was holding a wet T-shirt to his face. He kept dipping the T-shirt in the icy water and then putting it back on his face.

“How’s the roast pig coming along?” Danny asked him.

“Oh, Christ,” the painter said; he hurried after Rolf in the direction of the smoking hole.

There was potato salad and a green salad and some kind of cold pasta on the dining-room table, together with the wine and the rest of the booze.

“Does any of this food look interesting to you?” Danny asked Joe. The writer hadn’t been able to find an opener in the farmhouse kitchen, but he’d used the handle on one of the kitchen drawers to open both beers. He drank the first beer very fast; he was already halfway through the second.

“Where’s any meat?” Joe asked.

“I guess it’s still cooking,” his dad said. “Let’s go look at it.”

Someone had turned on a car radio, so they could have music outdoors. Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” was playing. Rolf and the painter with the beard had managed to lift the bedsprings out of the fire pit; the painter with the beard had burned his hands, but Rolf had taken off his jeans and used them as pot holders. Rolf’s nose and the cut on his eyebrow were still bleeding as he put his jeans back on. Some of the roast pig had fallen off the bedsprings into the fire, but there was plenty to eat and it was certainly cooked enough-it looked very well done, in fact.

“What is it?” Joe asked his dad.

“Roast pork-you like pork,” Danny told the boy.

“Once upon a time it was a pig,” Rolf explained to the two-year-old.

“A pretty small one, Joe,” Danny told his son. “Not one of your big friends in the pen.”

“Who killed it?” Joe asked. No one answered him, but Joe didn’t notice-he was distracted. Lady Sky was standing over the blackened pig on the bedsprings; little Joe was clearly in awe of her, as if he expected her to take flight again and fly away.

“Lady Sky!” the boy said. Amy smiled at him. “Are you an angel?” Joe asked her. (She was beginning to look like one, to Danny.)

“Well, sometimes,” Lady Sky said. She was distracted, too. A car was turning in to the long driveway of the pig farm-probably the little plane’s pilot and copilot, Danny was thinking. Amy took another look at the roast pig on the bedsprings. “But there are other times when I’m just a vegetarian,” she said to Joe. “Like today.”

Merle Haggard was singing “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” on the car radio; probably someone had changed the station. Out on the lawn, Katie had been dancing by herself-or with her glass of wine-but she stopped now. Everyone was curious about the pilot and the copilot, if only to see what would happen when they arrived. Amy walked over to the car before the two men could get out.

“Fuck you, Georgie-fuck you, Pete,” the skydiver greeted them.

“We were too high up to see the pigs, Amy-we couldn’t see them when you jumped,” one of the men told her; he handed her some clothes.

“Fuck you, Pete,” Amy told him again. She took off her towel and threw it at him.

“Calm down, Amy,” the other man said. “The guys on the farm should have told us there were pigs.”

“Yeah, well-I made that point to them, Georgie,” the skydiver told him.

Georgie and Pete were surveying the artists in the pig-roast crowd. They must have noticed that Rolf was bleeding, and the painter with the beard still held a wet T-shirt to his face; the pilot and copilot surely knew this was Amy’s work.

“Which one ran into the pigpen to help you?” Pete asked her.

“See the small guy in the boxers? The little boy’s daddy-that’s the one,” Amy said. “My rescuer.”

“Thanks,” Pete said to Danny.

“We appreciate it,” Georgie told the writer.

Lady Sky was only slightly less formidable-looking when she was dressed, in part because she dressed like a man-except for her underwear, which was black and skimpy. Amy wore a blue denim workshirt, tucked in, and jeans with a belt with a big buckle; her cowboy boots had a rattlesnake pattern. She walked over to where Danny was holding little Joe. “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” Lady Sky told the boy; she bent over him, kissing his forehead. “Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy,” she said to Joe.

Katie was dancing by herself again, but she was watching how the skydiver made a fuss over her husband and little boy; Katie never took her eyes off the big woman. There was a song from The Rolling Stones’ album Between the Buttons on the radio, but Danny could never remember which song it was. By then, he’d had a third beer and was working on his fourth-this was on top of the red wine, and he still hadn’t eaten. Someone had once again changed the station on the car radio, the writer had noticed. He’d watched Lady Sky kiss his son, sensing that the kiss was meant for him; Amy must have known there was no better way to make an impression on a parent than to be nice to the beloved child. But who was she? Danny wanted to know. The scar from her cesarean section must have made her someone’s mother, but Danny wondered if one of the stooges with her was her husband or boyfriend.

“Can we get anything to eat here?” Georgie was asking.

“Believe me, Georgie, we don’t want to eat here,” Amy told him. “Not even Pete,” she added, without looking at him-as if Pete couldn’t be trusted to make his own food decisions. Danny didn’t think she was sleeping with either of them.

The pilot and copilot tried to be careful how they stuffed the parachute and the skydiver’s harness into the trunk of the car, but it was impossible not to get some pig shit on themselves in the process. Amy got into the driver’s seat of the car.

“You driving, Amy?” Georgie asked her.

“It looks like it,” she told him.

“I’ll get in the back,” Pete said.

“You’ll both get in the back,” Amy told them. “I’ve smelled enough pig shit today.” But before the men could get into the car, the skydiver said: “You see that pretty little woman, the dancer, over there? You can see her tits through her shirt-that one.”

Danny knew that both Georgie and Pete had already noticed Katie; most men did.

“Yeah, I see her,” Georgie said.

“What about her, Amy?” Pete asked.

“If you ever lose me-if my chute doesn’t open, or something-you can ask her to do anything. I’ll bet you she’d do it,” the skydiver said.

The pilot and copilot looked uneasily at each other. “What do you mean, Amy?” Pete asked.

“You mean she’d jump out of an airplane without any clothes on-you mean that kind of thing?” Georgie asked the skydiver.

“I mean she’d jump out of an airplane without a parachute,” Amy told them. “Wouldn’t you, honey?” she asked Katie.

Danny would remember this-how Katie liked it when the attention came to her, for whatever reason. He saw that his wife had found her sandals, though she wasn’t wearing them. She held the sandals in one hand, her wineglass in the other, and she just kept moving her feet-she was still dancing. “Well, that would depend on the circumstances,” Katie said, lolling her head and neck to the music, “but I wouldn’t rule it out-not categorically.”

“See what I mean?” Amy asked Georgie and Pete, as the two men got into the backseat. Then the skydiver drove away, giving the artists the finger out the window of the car. Patsy Cline was singing on the radio, and Katie had stopped dancing; someone must have changed the station again.

“I don’t want to eat the pig,” Joe told his dad.

“Okay,” Danny said. “We’ll try to eat something else.”

He carried the boy over to where his mother had stopped dancing; Katie was just swaying in place, as if waiting for the music to change. She was drunk, Danny could tell, but she didn’t smell like marijuana anymore-he’d shampooed every trace of the pot out of her hair. “Under what circumstances would you ever jump out of an airplane without a parachute?” the writer asked his wife.

“To get out of a boring marriage, maybe,” Katie answered him.

“Since I’m the driver, I’d like to leave before dark,” he told her.

“Lady Sky is an angel, Mommy,” Joe said.

“I doubt it,” Katie said to the boy.

“She told us she was an angel sometimes,” Danny said.

“That woman has never been an angel,” Katie told them.

JOE WAS SICK in his car seat on their way into Iowa City. A Johnson County sheriff’s car had followed them the whole way on U.S. 6. Danny was afraid he might have a taillight out, or that he’d been driving erratically; he was thinking about how much to say he’d had to drink if the police car pulled them over, when the sheriff turned north on the Coralville strip, and Danny kept driving into downtown Iowa City. He couldn’t remember how much he’d actually had to drink. In his boxer shorts, Danny knew he wouldn’t have been very convincing to the sheriff.

Danny was thinking he was home free when Joe threw up. “It was probably the potato salad,” he told the boy. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be home in just a couple of minutes.”

“Let me out of the fucking car,” Katie said.

“Here?” Danny asked her. “You want to walk home from here?” He saw she’d already put on her sandals. They were still downtown.

“Who said I was coming home?” she asked him.

“Oh,” Danny said.

Just before dark, he’d seen her talking to someone on the phone in the farmhouse kitchen-probably Roger, Danny now decided. He pulled over at the next red light, and Katie got out of the car.

“Lady Sky really is an angel, Mommy,” Joe said to her.

“If you say so,” Katie said, shutting the door.

Danny knew she didn’t have any underwear on, but if it was Roger she was seeing, what did that matter?

SIX YEARS LATER, the early-morning traffic had subsided on Iowa Avenue. Yi-Yiing had long been back on Court Street-she was home from the hospital. (She’d probably told the cook about seeing Danny and young Joe on Iowa Avenue at such an early hour of the morning.)

“Why would you have died, too-if I’d really been hit by a car?” the eight-year-old asked his father.

“Because you’re supposed to outlive me. If you die before I do, that will kill me, Joe,” Danny told his son.

“Why don’t I remember her?” the boy asked his dad.

“You mean your mom?” Danny asked.

“My mom, the pigs, what happened next-I don’t remember any of it,” Joe answered.

“What about Lady Sky?” his father asked.

“I remember someone dropping from the sky, like an angel,” the boy told him.

“Really?” Danny asked.

“I think so. You haven’t told me about her before, have you?” Joe asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Danny said.

“Then what happened?” Joe asked his dad. “I mean, after Mom got out of the car downtown.”

Naturally, the writer had told young Joe an edited version of the pig roast. After he drove the two-year-old home from the farm, there was less that the storyteller had to censor from the tale. (No doubt because Katie hadn’t come home with them.)

In the early evening-it was just after dark-only the occasional passerby, and not one of Danny’s neighbors, had seen the writer in his boxer shorts carrying his two-year-old into the ground-floor apartment of the duplex on Iowa Avenue.

“Can you still smell the pigs?” little Joe had asked his dad, as they came inside.

“Only in my mind,” the writer answered.

“I can smell them, but I don’t know where they are,” the boy said.

“Maybe it’s the throw-up you smell, sweetie,” Danny said. He gave the boy a bath, and washed his hair again.

It was warm in the apartment, though the windows were open. Danny put little Joe to bed wearing just a diaper. If it got cooler in the night, he could put the boy’s pajamas on then. But after Joe had fallen asleep, Danny imagined he could still smell the pigs or the puke. He put on a pair of jeans and went out to the car; he brought the car seat into the kitchen and washed the vomit off it. (It probably would have been safer for little Joe to have eaten the pig instead of the potato salad, his dad was thinking.)

Later, Danny took a shower and had another shampoo. It was likely he’d had five beers, on top of the wine. Danny didn’t feel like another beer, but he didn’t want to go to bed, either, and he’d had too much to drink to even think about writing. Katie was gone for the night, he felt certain.

There was some vodka-it was what Katie drank when she didn’t want her breath to smell like she’d been drinking-and some rum from Barbados. Danny found a lime in the fridge; he cut a chunk out of the lime and put it in a tall glass with ice, and filled the glass with rum. He was wearing a clean pair of boxers when he sat for a while in the darkened living room by an open window, watching the diminishing traffic on Iowa Avenue. It was that time in the spring when the frogs and toads seemed especially loud-maybe because we have missed them all winter, the writer was thinking.

He was wondering what his life might have been like if he’d met someone like Lady Sky instead of Katie. Possibly, the skydiver had been closer to Danny’s age than he’d first thought. Maybe some bad stuff had happened to her-things that made her look older, the writer imagined. (Danny didn’t mean the scar from her cesarean section; he meant worse things.)

Danny woke up on the toilet, where he’d fallen asleep with a magazine on his lap; the empty glass with the chunk of lime stared up at him from the bathroom floor. It was cooler. Danny turned the light off in the kitchen, where he saw that he’d had more than one glass of rum-the bottle was nearly empty-though he didn’t remember pouring himself a second (or a third) drink. He wouldn’t remember what he did with the near-empty bottle, either.

He thought he’d better have a look at Joe before he staggered off to bed, and perhaps he should put some pajamas on the boy, but Danny felt he lacked the necessary dexterity to dress the sleeping child. Instead, he closed the windows in the boy’s bedroom and checked to be sure the rails on the child bed were secure.

Joe couldn’t have fallen out of bed with the rails in the lowered position, and the boy was that age when he could climb out of the bed if the rails were in either the raised or the lowered position. Sometimes the rails weren’t securely latched in either position; then the rails could slip, pinching the boy’s fingers. Danny checked to be sure the rails were locked fast in the raised position. Joe was sleeping soundly on his back, and Danny leaned over to kiss him. This was awkward to do when the bed rails were raised, and Danny had had enough to drink that he couldn’t manage to kiss his son without losing his balance.

He left Joe’s bedroom door open, to be sure he would hear the boy if he woke up and cried. Danny left the door to the master bedroom open, too. It was after three in the morning. Danny noted the time on the alarm clock on the night table as he got into bed. Katie wasn’t back from seeing Roger, if that’s who she was seeing.

Whenever Danny closed his eyes, the bedroom began to spin. He fell asleep with his eyes open-or he imagined that he did, because his eyes were open, and they felt very dry, when he was awakened in the morning by a man shouting.

“There’s a baby in the road!” some idiot was yelling.

Danny could smell the marijuana; he must have been half asleep, or only half awake, because he imagined that the shouting man was stoned. But the smell of the pot was beside Danny, on the nearest pillow. Katie was sleeping naked there, the covers thrown off and her hair redolent of marijuana. (It was Danny’s impression that Roger smoked dope all the time.)

“Whose baby is this?” the man was shouting. “This baby’s gotta belong to someone!”

Maniacal shouting would occasionally reach them from the noisy sorority house farther west on Iowa Avenue, or from the downtown area, but not during what amounted to the morning rush hour.

“Baby in the road!” the maniac kept repeating. It was cold in the bedroom, too, Danny only now realized; he’d passed out with the windows open, and whenever Katie had come home, she’d not bothered to close them.

“It’s not our fucking baby,” Katie said; her voice was slurred, or she spoke into her pillow. “Our baby’s in bed with us, fuckhead!”

“He is?” Danny asked, sitting up; his head was pounding. Little Joe wasn’t in the tousled bed with them.

“Well, he was,” Katie said; she sat up in bed, too. Her cheeks were a little roughed up, or red-looking-the way your face can get when you’re kissing someone with a scratchy beard, the writer supposed. “The kid was fussing about something, so I brought him into bed with us,” Katie was saying.

Danny had already headed down the hall. He saw that Joe’s bed was empty, with the rails in the lowered position; Katie was so short, she could never lift the boy out of his bed without first lowering the rails.

The traffic was backed up on Iowa Avenue -all the way east, to the bend on Muscatine -as if there’d been an accident in the avenue, directly in front of Danny’s ground-floor apartment. Danny ran out the front door of the duplex in his boxer shorts. Given his state of undress, the writer must have struck the driver of the dirty-white van, which was blocking the incoming traffic to town, as a likely candidate for the neglectful parent.

“Is this your baby?” the van driver screamed at Danny. The handlebar mustache and bushy sideburns may have frightened little Joe as much as the man’s ceaseless shouting-that and the fact that the van driver had managed to corral Joe on the grassy median strip in the middle of Iowa Avenue without actually picking the boy up, or even touching him. Joe stood uncertainly on the grass in his diaper; he’d wandered out of the house and across the sidewalk, into the lane of incoming traffic, and the dirty-white van had been the first vehicle to almost hit him.

Now a woman from the car that was stopped behind the white van ran into the median and scooped the baby into her arms. “Is that your daddy?” she asked Joe, pointing to Danny in his boxer shorts. Joe started to cry.

“He’s mine-I was asleep,” Danny told them. He crossed the pavement into the median strip, but the woman-middle-aged, glasses, a pearl necklace (Danny would remember nothing more definitive about her)-seemed reluctant to give the baby up.

“Your baby was in the street, pal-I almost ran over him,” the van driver told Danny. “The fucking diaper, its whiteness, just caught my eye.”

“It doesn’t appear that you were looking for this baby, or that you even knew he was missing,” the woman said to Danny.

“Daddy,” Joe said, holding out his arms.

“Does this child have a mother?” the woman wanted to know.

“She’s asleep-we were both asleep,” Danny told her. He took little Joe from the woman’s tentatively outstretched arms. “Thank you,” Danny said to the van driver.

“You’re still wasted, man,” the driver told him. “Is your wife wasted, too?”

“Thank you,” Danny told him again.

“You should be reported,” the woman said to him.

“Yes, I should be,” Danny told her, “but please don’t.”

Now cars were honking their horns, and Joe started to cry again. “I couldn’t see the sky from the house,” the boy was sobbing.

“You couldn’t see the sky?” his dad asked. They crossed the pavement to the sidewalk, and went into the house to the continuous honking of horns.

“I couldn’t see if Lady Sky was coming down,” Joe said.

“You were looking for Lady Sky?” his father asked.

“I couldn’t see her. Maybe she was looking for me,” the boy said.

The divided avenue was wide; from the middle of the road, or from the median strip, Danny realized that his two-year-old had been able to see the sky. The boy had been hoping that Lady Sky would descend again-that was all there was to it.

“Mommy’s home,” Joe told his dad, as they came into the apartment, which the two-year-old called the umpartment; from the moment he’d begun to talk, an apartment was an umpartment.

“Yes, I know Mommy’s home,” Danny said. He could see that Katie had fallen back to sleep. On the kitchen table, the writer also noticed that the rum bottle was empty. Had he finished it before going to bed, or had Katie downed what was left in the bottle when she’d come home? (It was probably me, Danny thought; he knew that Katie didn’t like rum.)

He took Joe into the boy’s room and changed his diaper. He had trouble looking at his son’s eyes-imagining them open and staring, unseeing, as the two-year-old in his bright-white diaper lay dead in the road.

“AND THEN YOU stopped drinking, right?” young Joe asked his father. For the duration of the long story, they’d kept their backs to the house they had lived in with Katie.

“The last of that rum was the end of it,” Danny said to the eight-year-old.

“But Mom didn’t stop drinking, did she?” Joe asked his dad.

“Your mom couldn’t stop, sweetie-she probably still hasn’t stopped,” Danny told him.

“And I am grounded, right?” young Joe asked.

“No, you’re not grounded-you can go anywhere you want, on foot or on the bus. It’s your bicycle that’s grounded,” Danny said to the boy. “Maybe we’ll give your bike to Max. I’ll bet he could use it for a backup, or for spare parts.”

Joe looked up at the brilliant blue of the fall sky. No descending angel was going to get him out of this predicament. “You never thought Lady Sky was an angel, did you?” the boy asked his dad.

“I believed her when she said she was an angel sometimes,” Danny said.

The writer would drive all over Iowa City looking for the blue Mustang, but he wouldn’t find it. The police would never spot the rogue car, either. But, back on Iowa Avenue, all Danny did was put his arm around the eight-year-old’s shoulders. “Think of it this way,” he said to his son. “That blue Mustang is still looking for you. Six years ago, when you stood in this street-with nothing but a diaper on-maybe the blue Mustang was stuck in traffic. It might have been several cars behind the white van; that blue Mustang might have been trying to get you even then.”

“It’s not really looking for me, is it?” Joe asked.

“You better believe it is,” his dad told him. “The blue Mustang wants you-that’s why you’ve got to be careful.”

“Okay,” the eight-year-old told his father.

“Do you know any two-year-olds?” Danny asked his son.

“No,” the boy answered, “not that I can think of.”

“Well, it would be good for you to meet one,” his dad said, “just so you can see what you looked like in the road.”

That was when the cook drove down Iowa Avenue, in the incoming lane, and pulled over to the curb, where the father and son were standing. “Get in, you two,” Tony Angel told them. “I’ll drop Joe at school, then I’ll take you home,” the cook said.

“Joe hasn’t had any breakfast,” Danny told his dad.

“I made him a big lunch-he can eat half of it on the way to school, Daniel. Get in,” he repeated. “We have a … situation.”

“What’s wrong, Pop?” the writer asked.

“It seems that Youn is still married,” the cook replied, as Danny and Joe got into the car. “It seems that Youn has a two-year-old daughter, and that her husband and daughter have come to visit her-just to see how all the writing is going.”

“They’re at the house?” Danny asked.

“It’s good that they came after Youn was up. She was already in her room-writing,” the cook said.

Danny could imagine how she’d left their bedroom-meticulously, without a trace of herself remaining, just that pearl-gray nightie tucked under her pillow, or maybe it was the beige one. “Youn has a two-year-old?” Danny asked his dad. “I want Joe to see the daughter.”

“Are you crazy?” the cook said to his son. “Joe should go to school.”

“Youn is married?” Joe asked. “She has a kid?”

“It appears so,” Danny said; he was thinking about the novel Youn was writing-how it was so exquisitely written but not everything added up. The usually limpid prose notwithstanding, something had always been unclear about the book.

“I think you should go to school, sweetie,” Danny said. “You can meet a two-year-old another time.”

“But you want me to meet one, right?” Joe asked.

“What’s this about?” the cook inquired; he was driving to Joe’s school, not waiting for contradictory directions.

“It’s a long story,” Danny told him. “What’s the husband like? Is he a gangster?”

“He’s a surgeon in Korea, he told me,” Tony Angel replied. “He’s attending a surgical conference in Chicago, but he brought his daughter along, and they thought they’d surprise Mommy-and let Youn look after the two-year-old for a couple of days, while Kyung is in meetings. Some surprise, huh?” the cook asked.

“His name is Kyung?” Danny said. In the book Youn was writing, the gangster husband was named Jinwoo; Danny guessed that wasn’t the only element of her story she’d made up, and all along he’d thought her novel was too autobiographical!

“Her husband seems like a nice guy,” Tony Angel said.

“So I’m going to meet Youn’s two-year-old daughter?” Joe asked, as he was getting out of the car.

“Eat something,” the cook told his grandson. “I already called the school and told them you were coming late.”

“It sounds like you may meet the little girl, yes,” Danny told the boy. “But what are you on the lookout for?” he asked Joe, as the boy opened his lunch box and peered inside.

“The blue Mustang,” Joe answered, without hesitation.

“Smart boy,” his father said.

They were almost back at the Court Street house before the cook told his son, “Yi-Yiing and I decided that it should appear you two are a couple.”

“Why should Yi-Yiing and I be a couple?” Danny said.

“Because you’re the same age. While the husband from Korea is around, you should just pretend that you’re together. Not even a Korean surgeon is going to suspect that I’m sleeping with his wife,” the cook said. “I’m too old.”

“How do we pretend?” Danny asked his dad.

“Let Yi-Yiing do the pretending,” his father said.

In retrospect, the writer was thinking, the pretending hadn’t been the most difficult part of the impromptu deception. Yi-Yiing did a good job of acting as Danny’s girlfriend-that is, while Youn’s husband was there in the Court Street house. The surgeon from Seoul struck Danny as a sweet man, both proud of himself and embarrassed for “surprising” his writer wife. Youn, for her part, could not conceal how happy she was to see her daughter, Soo. The Korean writer’s eyes had sought Danny for some reassurance, and Danny hoped he’d provided it; he felt relieved, actually, because he’d been looking ahead to their inevitable parting with more than the usual guilt.

Yes, he would definitely be in Iowa City through this academic year-he’d already asked the Writers’ Workshop if he could stay another year after that-but Danny knew that he probably wouldn’t be staying in town long enough for Youn to finish her novel. (And when Danny went back to Vermont, he had all along been assuming that Youn would go back to Seoul.)

The surgeon, who would be in Chicago for only a few days, kissed his wife and daughter good-bye. All the introductions and good-byes had happened in the Court Street kitchen, where the cook acted as if he owned the place, and Yi-Yiing had two or three times slipped behind Danny and encircled him with her arms-drawing him to her, once kissing the back of his neck. It being a warm fall day, the writer wore only a T-shirt and jeans, and he could feel Yi-Yiing’s silky pajamas brushing against his back. These hugs conveyed a coziness between them, the writer supposed-not knowing what Youn might have made of this intimate contact, or if Yi-Yiing and the cook had informed the Korean adulteress of their plan that Danny and the Hong Kong nurse should “pretend” to be a couple.

The daughter, Soo, was a little jewel. “She’s not wearing a diaper?” Danny asked the surgeon, remembering Joe at that age.

“Girls are toilet-trained before boys, honey,” Yi-Yiing told him, with what struck the writer as an overacted emphasis on the honey word-but the cook had laughed, and so had Youn. Danny would wonder, later, if perhaps Youn had also been relieved that her relationship with her fiction teacher was so efficiently ended. (What need was there for any further explanation?)

The days when the Korean doctor was in Chicago were easy enough, and Joe could see with his own eyes how innocent a two-year-old really was-about dangers in the road, obviously, but about angels falling from the sky, too. The eight-year-old could observe for himself that little Soo was capable of believing anything.

The fragrant nightie under the pillow on Youn’s side of the bed turned out to be the beige one, and Danny found a discreet moment to give it back to her. Now no evidence of her remained in his bedroom. Youn slept with her tiny daughter in her writing room; they were both small enough to fit in the bed in that extra bedroom, although Danny had suggested to Youn that she could put Soo in the extra extra bedroom. (He’d noticed that Youn’s husband had slept in that room, alone.)

“A two-year-old shouldn’t sleep unattended,” Youn had told Danny, who realized that he’d misread the curiosity with which Youn had scrutinized Joe; she’d simply been wondering what changes to expect in her daughter between the ages of two and eight. (As for what she’d written about, and why, there would never be a satisfactory explanation, Danny supposed.)

When Kyung came back from Chicago, and the doctor soon left again with his little girl-they went home to Seoul together-Youn wasted no time in finding a place of her own to live, and by the next semester she had transferred to someone else’s fiction workshop. Whether she ever finished her novel-in-progress was immaterial to the writer Danny Angel. Whether Youn would one day become a published novelist also mattered little to Danny, who knew firsthand that-in Youn’s time in Iowa City -her fiction had been an almost complete success.

It was Yi-Yiing’s success, at pretending to be Danny’s girlfriend, that would linger a little longer. The ER nurse was not naturally flirtatious, but for months after the need to pretend she and Danny were a couple, Yi-Yiing would occasionally brush against the writer, or trail her fingers, or the back of her hand, against Danny’s cheek. It seemed she had sincerely forgotten herself, for she would instinctively stop-as soon as she’d started something. Danny doubted that the cook ever saw her do this; if Joe saw, the eight-year-old took no notice.

“Would you prefer it if I dressed normally around the house?” Yi-Yiing would one day ask the writer. “I mean, maybe it’s ‘enough already’ with the pajamas.”

“But you’re the Pajama Lady-that’s just who you are,” Danny told her evasively.

“You know what I mean,” Yi-Yiing said to him.

She stopped wearing them-or, perhaps, she only slept in them. Her normal clothes were a safer barrier between them, and what had amounted to the occasional contact-the brush of her passing behind his back, the touch of her fingertips or the knuckles on her small hands-stopped soon after as well.

“I miss Yi-Yiing’s pajamas,” Joe said to his dad one morning, when they were walking to the boy’s school.

“I do, too,” Danny told him, but by then the writer was seeing someone else.

WITH YOUN GONE FROM their lives-especially later, in their last year in Iowa City, when they were living in the third house on Court Street-their regular habits resumed as if uninterrupted. The third house was on the other side of Court Street, near Summit, where Danny conducted a discreet daytime affair with an unhappy faculty wife whose husband was cheating on her. The back alley, where Joe had been tempted to pity himself-while he watched Max practice skids on his “backup” bike-was also gone from their lives, as was the possum. The Yokohamas, Sao and Kaori, still took turns babysitting for Joe, and everyone-all of them-gathered with a seemingly increasing need (or desperation) at Mao’s.

The cook knew in advance how much he would miss the Cheng brothers-almost as much as he would miss Yi-Yiing. It was never knowing what it might have been like to be with the Hong Kong nurse that Danny would miss, though his return to Vermont was preceded by another kind of closure.

As their Iowa adventure was concluding, so was-at long last-the war in Vietnam. The mood at Mao’s was not predisposed to a happy ending. “Operation Frequent Wind,” as the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was called-“Operation More Bullshit,” Ketchum had called it-turned out to be a devastating distraction from the dinnertime preparations at the Asian and French restaurant. The TV in the little kitchen off the Coralville strip proved to be a magnet for discontent.

April 1975 had been a bad month for business at Mao’s. There were four drive-by brick-throwings-one of the restaurant’s window-breakers was actually a chunk of cement the size of a cinder block, and one was a rock. “Fucking patriot farmers!” Xiao Dee had called the vandals. He and the cook had canceled a shopping trip to Chinatown because Xiao Dee was convinced that Mao’s was under attack-or, as Saigon fell, the restaurant would come under heavier siege. Ah Gou was running short of his favorite ingredients. (With Tony Angel’s help, there were a few more items from Italy on the menu than usual.)

All that year, the South Vietnamese soldiers were deserting in droves. The runaway soldiers had been rounding up their families and converging on Saigon, where they must have believed the Americans would help them escape the country. In the last two weeks of April, the U.S. had airlifted sixty thousand foreigners and South Vietnamese; hundreds of thousands more would soon be left to find their own way out. “It will be sheer chaos,” Ketchum had predicted. (“What did we expect would happen?” the logger would say later.)

Did we care what would happen? Danny was thinking. He and Joe had a table to themselves at Mao’s, and Yi-Yiing had joined them for dinner. She’d skipped her shift in the emergency room because she had a cold; she didn’t want to make a lot of sick or injured people any worse, she’d told Danny and Joe. “I’m already going to make you two sick-you two and Pop,” she said to them, smiling.

“Thanks a lot,” Danny told her. Joe was laughing; he adored Yi-Yiing. The boy would miss having his own nurse when he was back in Vermont. (And I’ll miss having a nurse for him, the writer was thinking.)

There were two couples at one table, and three businessmen types at another. It was a quiet night for Mao’s, but it was still early. The boarded-up window didn’t improve the looks of the front entrance, Danny was thinking, when one of the Yokohamas came out of the kitchen, her face as white as her apron and her lower lip trembling. “Your dad says you should see what’s on television,” the Japanese girl said to the writer. “The TV’s in the kitchen.”

Danny got up from the table, but when Joe tried to go with him, Yi-Yiing said, “Maybe you should stay with me, Joe.”

“Yes, you stay!” Sao or Kaori told the boy. “You shouldn’t see!”

“But I want to see what it is,” Joe said.

“Do what Sao says, Joe-I’ll be right back,” his dad told him.

“I’m Kaori,” the Japanese twin said to Danny. She burst into tears. “Why am I getting the feeling that all ‘gooks’ are the same to you Americans?”

“What’s on the TV?” Yi-Yiing asked her.

The two couples had been laughing about something; they hadn’t heard Kaori’s outburst. But the businessmen types had frozen; the gooks word held them poised over their beers.

Ah Gou’s smart girlfriend, Tzu-Min, was the maître d’ that night. Xiao Dee was too agitated by the brick-throwing patriot farmers to be safely allowed out of the kitchen.

“Go back in the kitchen, Kaori,” Tzu-Min told the sobbing girl. “No crying permitted out here.”

“What’s on the TV?” Yi-Yiing asked the maître d’.

“Joe shouldn’t see it,” Tzu-Min told her. Danny had already disappeared into the kitchen.

It was bedlam back there. Xiao Dee was shouting at the television. Sao, the other Japanese twin, was throwing up in the big sink-the one the dishwasher scrubbed the pots and pans in.

Ed, the dishwasher, stood aside; a recovering alcoholic, he was a World War II vet with several faded tattoos. The Cheng brothers had given Ed a job at a time when no one else would, and Ed felt loyal to them, though the small Coralville kitchen made him feel claustrophobic at times, and the political talk at Mao’s was a foreign country to him. Ed had no use for foreign countries; that we were getting out of Vietnam was good enough for him. He’d been in the navy, in the Pacific. Now one of the Japanese twins was vomiting in his sink and the other one was in tears. (Ed might have been thinking that he had killed their relatives; if so, he was not sorry about it.)

“How’s it going, Ed?” Danny said to the dishwasher.

“It’s not going too good right now,” Ed told him.

“Kissinger is a war criminal!” Xiao Dee was screaming. (Henry Kissinger had appeared, albeit briefly, on the television.) Ah Gou, who was chopping scallions, brandished his cleaver at the mere mention of the hated Kissinger, but now the TV returned to that image of enemy tanks rolling through the streets of Saigon; the tanks were closing in on the U.S. Embassy there, or so some nameless voice said. It was almost the end of April-these were the last airlifts, the day before Saigon surrendered. About seventy American helicopters had been shuttling between the walled-off courtyard of the embassy and the U.S. warships off the coast; as many as sixty-two hundred people were rescued that day. The last two helicopters to leave Saigon carried away the U.S. ambassador and the embassy’s marine guards. Hours later, South Vietnam surrendered.

But that wasn’t what was hard to watch on the little TV in the kitchen at Mao’s. There were more people who wanted to leave Saigon than there were helicopters. Hundreds would be left behind in the embassy’s courtyard. Dozens of Vietnamese clung to the skids of the last two helicopters to leave; they fell to their deaths as the choppers lifted away. The television just kept showing it. “Those poor people,” the cook had said, seconds before Sao threw up in Ed’s sink.

“They’re not people, not to most Americans-they’re gooks!” Xiao Dee was shouting.

Ah Gou was watching the TV instead of the scallions; he chopped the first digit off the index finger of his left hand. Kaori, still in tears, fainted; the cook dragged her away from the stove. Danny took a dish towel and began to twist it, tightly, around Ah Gou’s upper arm. The tip of Big Brother’s finger lay in a pool of blood with the chopped scallions.

“Go get Yi-Yiing,” the cook said to Sao. Ed took a wet towel and wiped the girl’s face. Sao was as insubstantial-looking as her fainted twin, but she had stopped throwing up, and, like a ghost, she drifted away to the dining room.

When the swinging door to the dining room opened, Danny heard one of the businessmen say, “What kind of crazy, fucked-up place is this, anyway?”

“Ah Gou cut off his finger,” he heard Sao say to Yi-Yiing.

Then the door swung closed and Danny didn’t hear how Sao or Tzu-Min or Yi-Yiing answered the businessman, or if any of the women had tried. (Mao’s was a crazy, fucked-up place that night when Saigon was falling.)

The door to the dining room swung open again, and they all came into the kitchen-Yi-Yiing with young Joe, Tzu-Min and Sao. Danny was mildly surprised that the three businessmen types and the two couples weren’t with them, though there was no room for anyone else in the chaotic kitchen.

“Thank God they all ordered the guinea hen,” the cook was saying.

Kaori had sat up on the floor. “The two couples are having the guinea hen,” she said. “The business guys ordered the ravioli.”

“I just meant the couples,” Tony Angel said. “I’m feeding them first.”

“The business guys are ready to walk out-I’m warning you,” Tzu-Min told them.

Yi-Yiing found the tip of Ah Gou’s finger in the scallions. Xiao Dee wrapped his arms around Ah Gou while the cook poured vodka on the stump of his left index finger. Big Brother was still screaming when Yi-Yiing held out the fingertip, and Tony Angel poured more vodka on it; then she put the fingertip back where it belonged. “Just hold it on,” she told Big Brother, “and stop screaming.”

Danny was sorry that Joe was watching the television; the ten-year-old seemed transfixed by that image of the people clinging to the helicopters’ skids, and then falling off. “What’s happening to them?” the boy asked his dad.

“They’re dying,” Danny said. “There’s no room for them on the helicopters.”

Ed was coughing; he went out the kitchen door. There was an alley back there-it was used for deliveries, and for picking up the trash-and they all thought that Ed was just stepping out for a cigarette. But the dishwasher never came back.

Yi-Yiing took Ah Gou out the swinging door and through the dining room; he held his severed fingertip in place, but now that Danny was no longer tightening the towel around his upper arm, Big Brother was bleeding profusely. Tzu-Min went with them. “I guess I’m going to give everyone in the emergency room my cold, after all,” Yi-Yiing was saying.

“What the fuck is going on?” one of the businessmen shouted. “Is there anyone working here, or what?”

“Racists! War criminals! Fascist pigs!” Ah Gou yelled at them, still bleeding.

In the kitchen, the cook said to his son and grandson, “You’re my sous chefs now-we better get started.”

“There are only two tables to deal with, Pop-I think we can manage this,” Danny told him.

“If we just ignore the business guys, I think they’ll leave,” Kaori said.

“Nobody leaves!” Xiao Dee shouted. “I’ll show them what kind of crazy, fucked-up place this is-and they better like it!”

He went out into the dining room through the swinging door-his ponytail in that absurd pink ribbon possibly belonging to Spicy-and even after the door swung shut, they could still hear Little Brother from the kitchen. “You want to eat the best food you ever had, or do you want to die?” Xiao Dee was yelling. “Asians are dying, but you can eat well!” he screamed at the businessmen.

“The guinea hen is served with asparagus, and a risotto of oyster mushrooms and sage jus,” the cook was explaining to Danny and young Joe. “Don’t slop the risotto on the plates, please.”

“Where are the guinea hens from, Pop?” Danny asked.

“From Iowa, of course-we’re out of almost everything that isn’t from Iowa,” the cook told him.

“You want to see how your mushroom and mascarpone ravioli gets made?” Xiao Dee was asking the businessmen types. “It’s done with Parmesan and white truffle oil! It’s the best fucking ravioli you’ll ever have! You think white truffle oil comes from Iowa ?” he asked them. “You want to come out in the kitchen and see a bunch of Asians dying? They are dying on TV right now-if you want to see!” Little Brother was shouting.

Tony Angel turned to the Japanese twins. “Go rescue the business guys from Xiao Dee,” he told them, “both of you.”

The cook accompanied the Yokohamas to the dining room, where they served the two couples the guinea hens. “Your pasta will be coming right along,” Tony told the businessmen; he’d wondered why the business guys had so quietly listened to Xiao Dee’s tirade. Now he saw that Little Brother had taken the bloody cleaver with him into the dining room.

“We need you back in the kitchen-we want you like crazy back there! We’re dying for you!” the Japanese twins were telling Xiao Dee; they had draped themselves on him, being careful not to touch the bloody cleaver. The businessmen types just sat there, waiting, even after the cook (and Xiao Dee, with Kaori and Sao) had gone back into the kitchen.

“What are the fascist pigs drinking?” Xiao Dee was asking the Yokohamas.

“ Tsingtao,” Kaori or Sao answered him.

“Bring them more-keep the beer coming!” Little Brother told them.

“What goes with the ravioli, Pop?” Danny asked his dad.

“The peas,” the cook told him. “Use the slotted spoon, or there will be too much oil on them.”

Joe couldn’t get interested in being a sous chef, not while the television kept showing the helicopters. When the phone rang, Joe was the only one whose hands weren’t busy doing something; he answered it. They all knew there was no maître d’ in the dining room, and they thought it might be Yi-Yiing or Tzu-Min calling from Mercy Hospital with a report on whether or not they could save Ah Gou’s finger.

“It’s collect, from Ketchum,” Joe told them.

“Say that you accept,” his grandfather told him.

“I accept,” the boy said.

“You talk to him, Daniel-I’m busy,” the cook said.

But in the passing of the telephone, they could all hear what Ketchum had to say-all the way from New Hampshire. “This asshole country-”

“Hi, it’s me-it’s Danny,” the writer told the old logger.

“You still sorry you didn’t get to go to Vietnam, fella?” Ketchum roared at him.

“No, I’m not sorry,” Danny told him, but it took him too long to say it; Ketchum had already hung up.

There was blood all over the kitchen. On the TV, the desperate Vietnamese dangled from, and then fell off, the skids of the helicopters. The debacle would be replayed for days-all over the world, the writer supposed, while he watched his ten-year-old watching the end of the war his dad hadn’t gone to.

The Japanese twins were placating the business guys with more beer. Xiao Dee was standing in the walk-in refrigerator with the door open. “We’re almost out of Tsingtao, Tony,” Little Brother was saying. He walked out of the fridge and closed the door; then he noticed that the door to the alley was still open. “What happened to Ed?” Xiao Dee asked. He stepped cautiously into the alley. “Maybe some fucking patriot farmer mistook him for one of us ‘gooks’ and killed him!”

“I think poor Ed just went home,” the cook said.

“I threw up in his sink-maybe that’s why,” Sao said. She and Kaori had come back to the kitchen to bring the business guys their pasta order.

“Can I turn the TV off?” Danny asked them all.

“Yes! Turn it off, please!” one of the Yokohamas told him.

“Ed is gone!” Xiao Dee was shouting from the alley. “The fucker-patriots have kidnapped him!”

“I can take Joe home and put him to bed,” the other twin said to Danny.

“The boy has to eat first,” the cook said. “You can be the maître d’ for a little while, can’t you, Daniel?”

“Sure, I can do it,” the writer told him. He washed his hands and face, and put on a clean apron. When he went into the dining room, the businessmen types seemed surprised that he wasn’t Asian-or especially angry-looking.

“What’s going on in the kitchen?” one of the men asked him tentatively; he definitely didn’t want Xiao Dee to overhear him.

“It’s the end of the war, on the television,” Danny told them.

“The pasta is terrific, in spite of everything,” another of the businessmen types said to Danny. “Compliments to the chef.”

“I’ll tell him,” Danny said.

Some faculty types showed up later, and a few proud parents taking their beloved university students out to dinner, but if you weren’t back in the kitchen at Mao’s with the angry Asians, you might not have known that the war was over, or how it ended. (They didn’t show that television footage everywhere, or for very long-not in most of America, anyway.)

Ah Gou would get to keep his fingertip. Kaori or Sao took young Joe home and put him to bed that night, and Danny drove home with Yi-Yiing. The cook would drive himself home, after Mao’s had closed.

There was an awkward moment-after the Japanese babysitter had gone, and before the cook came home-when Joe was asleep upstairs, and Danny was alone in the third Court Street kitchen with the nurse from Hong Kong. Like Danny and his dad, Yi-Yiing didn’t drink. She was making tea for herself-something allegedly good for her cold.

“So, here we are, alone at last,” Yi-Yiing said to him. “I guess we’re almost alone, anyway,” she added. “It’s just you and me and my damn cold.”

The kettle had not yet come to boil, and Yi-Yiing folded her arms on her breasts and stared at him.

“What?” Danny asked her.

“You know what,” she said to him. He was the first to lower his eyes.

“How’s it going with that tricky business of moving your daughter and your parents here?” he asked her. Finally, she turned away.

“I’m very slowly changing my mind about that,” Yi-Yiing told him.

Much later, the cook would hear that she’d gone back to Hong Kong; she was working as a nurse there. (None of them ever heard what happened to the Yokohamas, Kaori and Sao.)

That night the war ended, Yi-Yiing took her tea upstairs with her, leaving Danny alone in the kitchen. The temptation to turn on the TV was great, but Danny wandered outside to the Court Street sidewalk instead. It wasn’t very late-not nearly midnight-but most of the houses on the street were dark, or the only lights that were on were in the upstairs of the houses. People reading in bed, or watching television, Danny imagined. From several of the nearby houses, Danny could recognize that sickly light from a TV set-an unnatural blue-green, blue-gray shimmer. There was something wrong with that color.

It was warm enough in Iowa at the end of April for some windows to be open, and while he couldn’t make out the exact language on the television, Danny recognized the drone as the disembodied voice of the news-or so the writer imagined. (If someone had been watching a love story or another kind of movie, how would Danny have known?)

If the stars were out, Danny couldn’t see them. He’d lived on Court Street for three years; there’d been nothing ominous about living there, except for the driverless blue Mustang, and now the writer and his family were about to go back to Vermont. “This asshole country-” Ketchum had started to say; he’d been too angry or too drunk, or both, to even finish his thought. Wasn’t it too harsh an assessment, anyway? Danny hoped so.

“Please look after my dad and my little boy,” the writer said aloud, but to what was he speaking-or to whom? The starless night above Iowa City? The one alert and restless soul on Court Street who might have heard him? (Yi-Yiing-if she was still awake-maybe.)

Danny stepped off the sidewalk and into the empty street, as if daring the blue Mustang to take notice of him. “Please don’t hurt my father or my son,” Danny said. “Hurt me, if you have to hurt someone,” he said.

But who was out there, under the unseen heavens, to either look after them or hurt them? “Lady Sky?” the writer asked out loud, but Amy had never said she was a full-time angel, and he’d not seen her for eight years. There was no answer.

CHAPTER 11. HONEY

WHERE HAS MY MEMORY GONE? THE COOK WAS THINKING; he was almost sixty, his limp more pronounced. Tony Angel was trying to remember those markets Little Brother had taken him to in Chinatown. Kam Kuo was on Mott Street, Kam Man on the Bowery-or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter, the cook concluded; he could still recall the more important things.

How Xiao Dee had hugged him when they’d said good-bye-how Ah Gou had twisted the reattached tip of his left index finger, to make himself cry. “She bu de!” Xiao Dee had shouted. (The Cheng brothers pronounced this SEH BOO DEH.)

“She bu de!” Ah Gou cried, bending that scarred and slightly crooked first digit.

Chinese immigrants said she bu de to one another, Xiao Dee had explained to the cook during one of their sixteen-hour marathons to or from Chinatown, somewhere out on I-80. You said she bu de when you were leaving your Chinese homeland, for New York or San Francisco -or for anywhere far away, where you might not see your childhood friends or members of your own family ever again. (Xiao Dee had told Tony Angel that she bu de meant something like “I can’t bear to let go.” You say it when you don’t want to give up something you have.)

“She bu de,” the cook whispered to himself in his cherished kitchen at Avellino.

“What’s that, boss?” Greg, the sous chef, asked him.

“I was talking to my calamari,” Tony told him. “The thing with squid, Greg, is either you cook it just a little or you cook it forever-anything in between, and it’s rubber.”

Greg had certainly heard this soliloquy on squid before. “Uh-huh,” the sous chef said.

The calamari the cook was preparing for his son, Daniel, was the forever kind. Tony Angel slowly stewed it with canned tomatoes and tomato paste-and with garlic, basil, red pepper flakes, and black olives. The cook added the pine nuts and chopped parsley only at the end, and he served the squid over penne, with more chopped parsley on the side. (Never with Parmesan-not on calamari.) He would give Daniel just a small arugula salad after the pasta dish, maybe with a little goat cheese; he had a local Vermont chèvre that was pretty good.

But right now the pepperoni pizzas were ready, and the cook pulled them from the oven of his Stanley woodstove. (“She bu de,” he whispered to the old Irish stove, and Greg once more glanced in his direction.)

“You’re crying again-you know that, don’t you?” Celeste said to Tony. “You want to talk about it?”

“It must be the onions,” the cook told her.

“Bullshit, Tony,” she said. “Are those my two pepperonis for the old broads out there?” Without waiting for an answer, Celeste said: “They better be my pizzas. Those old girls are looking hungry enough to eat Danny for a first course.”

“They’re all yours,” Tony Angel told Celeste. He’d already put the penne in the pot of boiling water, and he took one out with a slotted spoon and tasted it while he watched every step of Celeste’s dramatic exit from the kitchen. Loretta was looking at him as if she were trying to decipher a code. “What?” the cook said to her.

“Mystery man,” Loretta said. “Danny’s a mystery man, too-isn’t he?”

“You’re as dramatic as your mother,” the cook told her, smiling.

“Is the calamari ready, or are you telling it your life story?” Loretta asked him.

Out in the dining room, Dot exclaimed: “My, that’s a thin-lookin’ crust!”

“It’s thin, all right,” May said approvingly.

“Our cook makes great pizzas,” Celeste told them. “His crusts are always thin.”

“What’s he put in the dough?” Dot asked the waitress.

“Yeah, what’s his secret ingredient?” May asked Celeste.

“I don’t know if he has one,” Celeste said. “I’ll ask him.” The two old broads were digging in-they ignored her. “I hope you ladies are hungry,” Celeste added, as she turned to go back to the kitchen. Dot and May just kept eating; this was no time to talk.

Danny watched the women eat with growing wonder. Where had he seen people eat like that? he was thinking. Surely not at Exeter, where table manners didn’t matter but the food was awful. At Exeter, you picked over your food with the greatest suspicion-and you talked nonstop, if only to distract yourself from what you were eating.

The old women had been talking and whispering (and cackling) together (like a couple of crows); now there wasn’t a word between them, and no eye contact, either. They rested their forearms on the table and bent over their plates, heads down. Their shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off an attack from behind, and Danny imagined that if he were closer to them, he might hear them emit an unconscious moan or growl-a sound so innately associated with eating that the women were unaware of it and had long ceased to hear it themselves.

No one in the North End had ever eaten that way, the writer was remembering. Food was a celebration at Vicino di Napoli, an event that inspired conversation; people were engaged with one another when they ate. At Mao’s, too, you didn’t just talk over a meal-you shouted. And you shared your food-whereas these two old broads appeared to be protecting their pizzas from each other. They wolfed their dinners down like dogs. Danny knew they wouldn’t leave a scrap.

“The Red Sox just aren’t reliable,” Greg was saying, but the cook was concentrating on the surprise squid dish for his son; he’d missed what had happened in the game on the radio.

“Daniel likes a little extra parsley,” he was saying to Loretta, just as Celeste came back into the kitchen.

“The two old broads want to know if there’s a secret ingredient in your pizza dough, Tony,” Celeste said to the cook.

“You bet there is-it’s honey,” Tony Angel told her.

“I would never have guessed that,” Celeste said. “That’s some secret, all right.”

Out in the dining room, it suddenly came to the writer Danny Angel where he’d seen people eat as if they were animals, the way these two old women were eating their pizzas. The woodsmen and the sawmill workers had eaten like that-not only in the cookhouse in Twisted River, but also in those makeshift wanigans, where he and his father had once fed the loggers during a river drive. Those men ate without talking; sometimes even Ketchum hadn’t spoken a word. But these tough-looking broads couldn’t have been loggers, Danny was thinking, when Loretta interrupted his thoughts.

“Surprise!” the waitress said, as she put the squid dish in front of him.

“I was hoping it was going to be the calamari,” Danny told her.

“Ha!” Loretta said. “I’ll tell your dad.”

May had finished her pepperoni pizza first, and anyone seeing the way she eyed the last piece on Dot’s plate might have had reason to warn Dot that she should never entirely trust her old friend. “I guess I liked mine a little better than you’re likin’ yours,” May said.

“I’m likin’ mine just fine,” Dot answered with her mouth full, her thumb and index finger quickly gripping the crust of that precious last slice.

May looked away. “That writer is finally eatin’ somethin’, and it looks pretty appetizin’,” she observed. Dot just grunted, finishing her pizza.

“Would you say it’s almost as good as Cookie’s?” May asked.

“Nope,” Dot said, wiping her mouth. “Nobody’s pizza is as good as Cookie’s.”

“I said almost, Dot.”

“Close, maybe,” Dot told her.

“I hope you ladies left room for dessert,” Celeste said. “It looks like those pizzas hit the spot.”

“What’s the secret ingredient?” May asked the waitress.

“You’ll never guess,” Celeste said.

“I’ll bet it’s honey,” Dot said; both she and May cackled, but they stopped cackling when they saw how the waitress was staring at them. (It didn’t happen often that Celeste was speechless.)

“Wait a minute,” May said. “It is honey, isn’t it?”

“That’s what the cook said-he puts honey in his dough,” Celeste told them.

“Yeah, and the next thing you’re gonna tell us is that the cook limps,” Dot said. That really cracked up the two old broads; Dot and May couldn’t stop cackling over that one, not that they missed the message in Celeste’s amazed expression. (The waitress might as well have told them outright. Yes, indeed, the cook limped. He limped up a storm!)

But Danny had overheard snippets of their conversation before the ladies’ cackling got out of control. He’d heard Celeste say something about his dad putting honey in the pizza dough, and one of the old broads had joked about the cook’s limp. Danny was sensitive about his father’s limp; he’d heard enough jokes on that subject to last a lifetime, most of them from those West Dummer dolts at that piss-poor Paris Manufacturing Company School. And why did Celeste look so stricken suddenly? the writer was wondering.

“Weren’t you ladies interested in the pie and the cobbler?” the waitress asked them.

“Wait a minute,” May said again. “Are you sayin’ your cook’s got a limp?”

“He limps a little,” Celeste hesitated to say, but in effect she’d already said it.

“Are you shittin’ us?” Dot asked the waitress.

Celeste seemed offended, but she also looked afraid; she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know why or what it was. Neither did Danny, but to anyone seeing him, the writer appeared to be frightened, too.

“Look, our cook’s got a limp, and he puts honey in his pizza dough-it’s no big deal,” Celeste said to them.

“Maybe it’s a big deal to us,” May told the waitress.

“Is he a little fella?” Dot asked.

“Yeah… and what’s his name?” May asked.

“I would say our cook is… slightly built,” Celeste answered carefully. “His name’s Tony.”

“Oh,” Dot said, disappointed.

“Tony,” May repeated, shaking her head.

“You can bring us one apple pie and one blueberry cobbler,” Dot told the waitress.

“We’ll share ’em,” May said.

It might have ended there, if Danny hadn’t spoken; it was his voice that made Dot and May look at him more closely. When they’d first seen him, they must have missed the writer’s physical resemblance to his father as a young man, but it was how well-spoken Danny was that reminded both Dot and May of the cook. In a town like Twisted River, the cook’s enunciation-and his perfect diction-had stood out.

“Might I inquire if you two ladies are from around here?” Danny asked those bad old broads.

“Sweet Jesus, May,” Dot said to her friend. “Don’t that voice kinda take you back?”

“Way back,” May said, looking hard at Danny. “Don’t he look just like Cookie, too?”

The Cookie word was enough to tell Danny where these old ladies were from, and why they might have been badgering Celeste about honey in pizza dough and a little fella of a cook-one who limped.

“Your name was Danny,” Dot said to him. “Have you changed your name, too?”

“No,” the writer told them too quickly.

“I gotta meet this here cook,” May said.

“Why don’tcha tell your dad to come say hello to us, will ya?” Dot asked Danny. “It’s been so long since we seen one another, we got some serious catchin’ up to do.”

Celeste came back with the ladies’ desserts, which Danny knew would be only a temporary distraction.

“Celeste,” Danny said. “Would you please tell Pop that there are two old friends who want to see him? Tell him they’re from Twisted River,” Danny told her.

“Our cook’s name is Tony,” Celeste said a little desperately to the bad old broads. She’d heard enough about Twisted River to make her hope she would never hear anything more about it. (The cook had told her it would be all over on the day Twisted River caught up to him.)

“Your cook’s name is Cookie,” Dot said to the waitress.

“Just tell him we’re chokin’,” May told Celeste. “That’ll bring him runnin’.”

“Limpin’, you mean,” Dot corrected her, but now their cackles were suppressed. If the writer had to guess, it seemed that these women had a score to settle with his father.

“You got the same superior-soundin’ voice as your daddy,” May said to Danny.

“Is the Injun around?” Dot asked him.

“No, Jane is… long gone,” Danny told them.

In the kitchen, Celeste was still dry-eyed when she walked past her daughter. “I could have used a little help with the party of eight, Mom,” Loretta was saying to her, “and then those three couples came in, but you just kept talking away to those two old biddies.”

“Those old biddies are from Twisted River,” Celeste told the cook. “They said to tell you they were chokin’… Cookie.” Celeste had never seen such an expression on Tony Angel’s face-none of them had-but of course she’d never called him “Cookie” before.

“Is there a problem, boss?” the sous chef asked.

“It was the honey in the pizza, wasn’t it?” Celeste was saying. “The honey gave it away, I guess.”

“Dot and May. It’s finished, sweetheart,” Tony Angel said to Celeste; she started to cry.

“Mom?” Loretta said.

“You don’t know me,” the cook told them all. “You won’t ever know where I go from here.” He took off his apron and let it fall on the floor. “You’re in charge, Greg,” he said to the sous chef.

“They don’t know your last name, not unless Danny tells them,” Celeste managed to say; Loretta was holding her while she sobbed.

The cook walked out into the dining room. Danny was standing between him and the two tough broads. “They don’t know the Angel name, Pop,” his son whispered to him.

“Well, that’s something to be thankful for,” his dad said.

“I wouldn’t call that a little limp-would you, May?” Dot asked her old friend.

“Hello, ladies,” the cook said to them, but he didn’t come any closer.

“The limp’s gotten worse, if you ask me,” May replied to Dot.

“Are you just traveling through?” the cook asked them.

“How come you changed your name, Cookie?” Dot asked him.

“Tony was easier to say than Dominic,” he answered them, “and it still sounds Italian.”

“You look awful, Cookie-you’re as white as flour!” May told him.

“I don’t get a lot of sunshine in the kitchen,” the cook said.

“You look like you been hidin’ under a rock,” Dot said to him.

“How come you and Danny are so spooked to see us?” May asked him.

“They were always superior to us,” Dot reminded her friend. “Even as a kid, you were a superior little snot,” she said to Danny.

“Where are you living nowadays?” the cook asked them. He was hoping they lived close by-somewhere in Vermont, or in New York State-but he could tell by their accents, and by just looking at them, that they were still living in Coos County.

“ Milan,” May answered. “We see your pal Ketchum, from time to time.”

“Not that Ketchum would say hello to us, or nothin’,” Dot said. “You was all so superior-the three of you and the Injun!”

“Well…” the cook began; his voice trailed away. “I have a lot to do, in the kitchen.”

“First you was gonna put honey in the dough, and the next minute you wasn’t. Then you changed your mind about it again, I guess,” May said to him.

“That’s right,” the cook said.

“I’m havin’ a look in the kitchen,” Dot suddenly said. “I don’t believe a fuckin’ word these two are tellin’ us. I’m gonna see for myself if Jane’s still with him!” Neither Danny nor his dad did anything to stop her. May just waited with them while Dot went into the kitchen.

“There’s the two waitresses, both of ’em cryin’, and a young cook, and what looks like a busboy, and some kid doin’ the dishes-no Injun,” Dot announced, when she came back.

“Boy, do you look like you’re puttin’ your pecker somewhere you shouldn’t, Cookie!” May told him. “You, too,” she said to Danny. “You got a wife and kids, or anythin’?”

“No wife, no children,” Danny told them-again, too quickly.

“Bullshit,” Dot said. “I don’t believe a fuckin’ word!”

“And I suppose you’re not bangin’ anybody, either?” May asked the cook. He didn’t answer her; he just kept looking at his son, Daniel. Their minds were racing far ahead of this moment in Avellino. How soon could they leave? Where would they go this time? How long before these bad old broads crossed paths with Carl, and what would they tell the cowboy when they ran into him? (Carl lived in Berlin; Ketchum lived in Errol. Milan was between them.)

“If you ask me, Cookie’s humpin’ our waitress-that older one,” Dot said to May. “She’s the one doin’ most of the cryin’.”

The cook just turned and walked back into the kitchen. “Tell them their dinners are on me, Daniel-free pizzas, free desserts,” he said as he was leaving.

“You don’t need to tell us-we heard him,” May said to Danny.

“You coulda just been nice to us-glad to see us, or somethin’!” Dot called after the cook, but he was gone. “You don’t hafta buy us supper, Cookie!” Dot hollered into the kitchen, but she didn’t go after him.

May was putting money on Danny’s table-too much money for their dinners, but Danny wouldn’t try to stop her. “And we didn’t even eat our pie and cobbler!” she said to the writer. May pointed to his notebook on the table. “What are you, the friggin’ bookkeeper or somethin’? You keepin’ the accounts, huh?”

“That’s right,” he told her.

“Fuck you and your dad,” Dot told him.

“Cookie was always holier-than-thou, and you were always a holier-than-thou kid!” May said to him.

“Sorry,” Danny said. He just wanted them to leave so that he could concentrate on all that he and his dad had to do, and how much or little time they had to do it-beginning with telling Ketchum.

Meanwhile, there was an unserved party of eight and another table with three astonished-looking couples. Everyone had been paying close attention to the confrontation, but it was over now. Dot and May were leaving. The women both gave Danny the finger as they went out the door. For a bewildering moment-it was almost as if the sawmill workers’ wives weren’t real, or they had never found their way to Avellino -the old ladies didn’t appear to know which way to turn on Main Street. Then they must have remembered that they’d parked downhill, past the Latchis Theatre.

When the bad old broads were gone, Danny spoke to the restaurant’s uneasy, unattended patrons. “Someone will be right with you,” he told them, not knowing if this was even remotely true; he knew it wouldn’t be true if both Loretta and Celeste were still in tears.

Back in the kitchen, it was worse than Danny had expected. Even the kid doing dishes and the busboy were crying. Celeste had slumped to the floor, where Loretta was kneeling beside her. “Stop shouting at me!” the cook yelled into the telephone. “I should never have called you-then I wouldn’t have to listen to you!” (His father must have called Ketchum, Danny realized.)

“Tell me what to say, Greg, and I’ll say it,” Danny said to the sous chef. “You’ve got a table of eight and a table of six out there. What do I tell them?”

Greg was weeping into the rosemary and red-wine reduction. “Your dad said Avellino is finished,” Greg told him. “He said this is his last night. He’s putting the place up for sale, but we can run the restaurant ourselves until it sells-if we can manage, somehow.”

“Greg, just how the fuck do we manage?” Celeste cried out.

“I didn’t say we could,” Greg blubbered.

“Get rid of the Red Sox, for starters,” Danny said, changing the radio station. “If you’re going to be hysterical, you ought to play some music back here-everyone in the restaurant can hear you.”

“Yes, I know you were always of the opinion that Vermont was too fucking close to New Hampshire, Ketchum!” the cook was shouting into the phone. “Why don’t you tell me something useful?”

“Tell me what to say to the customers, Greg,” Danny said to the blubbering sous chef.

“Tell them they better keep their orders simple,” Greg told him.

“Tell them to go home, for Christ’s sake!” Loretta said.

“No, goddamn it-tell them to stay!” the sous chef said angrily. “We can manage.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Greg,” Celeste told him; she was still sobbing.

Danny went back into the dining room, where the party of eight was already arguing with one another-about whether to stay or leave, no doubt. The three couples at the table for six seemed more resigned to their fate, or at least more willing to wait. “Listen,” Danny said to them all, “there’s a crisis in the kitchen-I’m not kidding. I would advise you either to leave now or to order something basic. The pizzas, maybe, or a pasta dish. By the way, the beef satay is excellent. So is the calamari.”

He went to the wine rack and picked out a couple of good reds; Danny Angel may have stopped drinking sixteen years ago, when he was still Daniel Baciagalupo, but the writer knew the names of the better bottles. “The wine is on me,” he told them, bringing them glasses, too. He had to go back to the kitchen to get a corkscrew from either Loretta or Celeste, and one of the party of eight asked him timidly for a beer. “Sure,” Danny said. “A beer’s no problem. You should try a Moretti.”

At least Celeste was standing, though Loretta looked in better shape. “One Moretti for the party of eight. I gave wine to everyone else-on me,” Danny said to Loretta. “Can you pull the corks?”

“Yeah, I guess I’m okay,” Loretta told him.

“I can work,” Celeste said unconvincingly.

“You better get your dad off the phone before he has a heart attack,” Greg said to Danny.

“I’m not changing my name again!” the cook was screaming into the phone. “I’m not leaving my country, Ketchum! Why do I have to leave the entire country?”

“Let me speak to him, Pop,” Danny said; he kissed his father on the forehead, taking the telephone from him. “It’s me, Ketchum,” the writer began.

“Dot and May!” Ketchum hollered. “For Christ’s sake, Danny-those two would talk their heads off to a pinch of coon shit! The first time those bitches run into Carl, the cowboy’s going to know where to find you!”

“How long do we have, Ketchum?” Danny asked. “Just give me an educated guess.”

“You should have left yesterday,” Ketchum told him. “You have to leave the country as soon as possible!”

“The country?” Danny asked.

“You’re a famous writer! What do you have to live in this asshole country for?” Ketchum asked him. “You can write anywhere, can’t you? And how long before Cookie retires? For that matter, he can cook anywhere-can’t he? Just don’t let it be an Italian place! That’s what the cowboy will be looking for. And Cookie needs a new name.”

“Dot and May never heard the Angel name,” Danny told the old logger.

“Carl could hear it-when he comes looking for you two, Danny. No matter how long after you’re gone, someone could say the Angel name to the cowboy.”

“So I’m supposed to change my name, too? For God’s sake, Ketchum-I’m a writer!”

“Keep it, then,” Ketchum said morosely. “The cowboy’s no reader, I’ll grant you that. But Cookie can’t keep the Tony Angel-he’d be better off being Dominic Baciagalupo again! Danny, don’t you dare let him cook in any restaurant with an Italian name-not even if it’s out of the country.”

“I have a son, Ketchum-he’s American, remember?” Danny said to the old woodsman.

“Joe is going to be in college in Colorado ,” Ketchum reminded him. This was a sore point with Danny: That Joe would be going to the University of Colorado, in Boulder, was something of a disappointment to his dad. In Danny’s opinion, his son had gotten into better schools. Danny believed that Joe was going to Colorado for the skiing, not an education; the writer had also read that Boulder was a big party town. “Carl doesn’t even know you have a child,” Ketchum also reminded Danny. “If you’re out of the country, I’ll look after Joe.”

“In Colorado?” Danny asked.

“First things first, Danny,” Ketchum said. “Get the fuck out of Vermont -both you and your dad! I can look after your boy in the interim-before he goes off to Colorado, anyway.”

“Maybe Pop and I could go to Colorado, too,” Danny suggested. “It’s a little like Vermont, I imagine-there are mountains, just bigger ones. Boulder is a university town, and we all liked Iowa City. Writers can fit in, in a university town. A cook could fit in, in Boulder -couldn’t he? It wouldn’t have to be Italian-”

Ketchum cut him off. “You must be as simple-minded as a pinch of coon shit, Danny! You guys ran the first time-now you have to keep running! Do you think Carl cares that you’re a family? The cowboy doesn’t have a family-he’s a fucking killer, Danny, and he’s on a mission!”

“I’ll let you know our plans, Ketchum,” the writer told his father’s old friend.

“Carl doesn’t know shit about foreign countries,” Ketchum said. “Hell, Boston wasn’t foreign enough for him. You think Colorado would be too far away for the cowboy to find you? Colorado ’s a lot like New Hampshire, Danny-they have guns out there, don’t they? You could be carrying a gun in Colorado, and no one would look at you twice-isn’t that right?”

“I suppose so,” Danny said. “I know you love us, Ketchum.”

“I promised your mom I would look after you!” Ketchum shouted, his voice breaking.

“Well, I guess you’re doing it,” Danny told him, but Ketchum had hung up. The writer would remember the song that was playing on the radio; it was Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” a song from the seventies. (When Danny had switched stations from the Red Sox game, he’d inadvertently found Greg’s Oldie-But-Goldie music.)

I was thinking about what a

Friend had said.

I was hoping it was a lie.

Danny saw that his father was once more stirring his sauces; the cook then started rolling out the dough for what looked like three or four more pizzas. Greg was grilling something, but the sous chef paused to take a dish out of the oven. Neither waitress was in the kitchen, but the busboy was busy filling a couple of bread baskets.

The dishwasher was waiting for more dirty dishes; an earnest-looking boy, he was reading a paperback. Probably an assignment for school, Danny thought; nowadays, kids didn’t read much on their own. Danny asked the boy what he was reading. The young dishwasher smiled shyly, showing the author a dog-eared mass-market edition of a Danny Angel novel. But that was such a tough night, when Dot and May made their disruptive appearance in Avellino, the writer would never remember which book the kid was reading.

And the bad night was far from over; for Danny, it was just beginning.

“YOU’LL FIND SOMEONE,” Kurt Vonnegut had said to Danny when the young writer was leaving Iowa City the first time; Katie had only recently left him. But it hadn’t happened-not yet. Danny supposed there was still time for him to find someone; he was only forty-one, and he never would have claimed that he’d sincerely been trying. Did he think Lady Sky was going to drop into his life again, just because he couldn’t forget her?

As for what Vonnegut also said to the then-unpublished writer-the part about “maybe capitalism will be kind to you”-well, Danny was wondering (as he drove home to Putney from Brattleboro) how Kurt had known.

On the night of Dot and May’s visit to Avellino, when Danny and his dad would soon be on the move again, the famous writer’s compound in Putney was ablaze with lights. To anyone driving by on Hickory Ridge Road, the lights that were on-in every room, in each building-seemed to advertise just how kind capitalism had been to the bestselling author Danny Angel.

Was the compound overrun with revelers? Was every last room of the old farmhouse (now the guesthouse) occupied-as was, evidently, the new house that Danny had built for himself and Joe? The lights were also on in the famous writer’s so-called writing shack, as if the partygoers were even partying there.

But Danny had left only the kitchen light on, in the new building; he’d left the other rooms (and the other buildings) dark. The music was loud and conflicting-it was coming from both the new building and the guesthouse, and every window must have been open. It was a wonder that someone hadn’t called the police about the noise; though the writer’s compound had no near neighbors, almost anyone driving by had to have heard the clashing music. Danny heard it, and saw all the lights ablaze even before he turned in to his driveway, where he stopped his car and turned off the engine and his headlights. There were no other cars around, except Joe’s. (It was parked in the open garage, where Joe had left it the last time the boy had been home from school.) From the far end of his driveway, Danny could see that even the lights in the garage were on. If Amy were ever to forgo arriving via parachute, the writer was thinking, maybe this was how she would announce herself.

Or was it a prank? Pranks weren’t Armando DeSimone’s style. Other than Armando, Danny had no close friends in the Putney area-certainly no one who would have felt comfortable coming on the writer’s property uninvited. Had Dot and May already called Carl? But those bad old broads didn’t know where Danny lived, and if the cowboy had somehow managed to find Danny Angel, wouldn’t the retired deputy have preferred the dark? Surely, the former constable and deputy sheriff wouldn’t have turned on all the lights and the music; why would Carl have wanted to announce himself?

Furthermore, there was no occasion for a surprise party-not that the writer could think of. Maybe it was Armando, Danny was reconsidering, but the choice of music couldn’t have been Armando’s or Mary’s. The DeSimones liked to dance; they were Beatles people. This sounded like eighties’ music-the stuff Joe played when he was home. (Danny didn’t know what the music was, but there were two separate sounds-both of them terrible, at war with each other.)

The tap-tap of the flashlight on the driver’s-side window made Danny jump in the seat. He saw it was his friend Jimmy, the state trooper. Jimmy must have turned off the headlights of his patrol car when he’d slipped into the driveway and had parked broadside, behind Danny’s car; he’d cut the police car’s engine, too, not that Danny could possibly have heard the trooper’s arrival over the music.

“What’s with the music, Danny?” Jimmy asked him. “It’s a little loud, isn’t it? I think you should turn it down.”

“I didn’t turn it on, Jimmy,” the writer said. “I didn’t turn on the lights or the music.”

“Who’s in your house?” the trooper asked.

“I don’t know,” Danny said. “I didn’t invite anyone.”

“Maybe they’ve come and gone-shall I have a look?” Jimmy asked him.

“I’ll come with you,” Danny told the trooper.

“Have you had any letters from a crazy fan lately?” Jimmy asked the writer. “Or any hate mail, maybe?”

“Nothing like that for a while,” Danny told him. There’d been the usual religious nuts, and the assholes who constantly complained about the writer’s “unseemly” language or the “too-explicit” sex.

“Everyone’s a fucking censor nowadays,” Ketchum had said.

Once he published East of Bangor -his so-called abortion novel-the hate mail might heat up for a while, Danny knew. But there’d been nothing of a threatening nature recently.

“There’s nobody out to get you-no one you know about, right?” Jimmy asked.

“There’s someone who thinks he has a score to settle with my dad-someone dangerous,” Danny said. “But this can’t be about that,” the writer said.

Danny followed the trooper into the kitchen of the new house first. Little things were amiss: The oven door was open; a bottle of olive oil lay on its side on the counter, but the cap was screwed on tight and the oil hadn’t leaked. Danny walked into the living room, where he could shut off the loudest of the head-pounding music, and he noted that a coffee-table lamp now lay on the couch, but nothing appeared to have been damaged. The deliberate but small disturbances signified mischief, not vandalism; the television had been turned on, but without sound.

Though Danny had walked through the dining room on his way to the living room, which was the source of half the music, he’d noticed only that one of the chairs at the dining-room table had been upended. But Jimmy had lingered there, at the table. When Danny turned the music off, Jimmy said, “Do you know whose dog this is, Danny? I believe it’s one of a pair of dogs I know out on the back road to Westminster West. The dogs belong to Roland Drake. Maybe you know him-he went to Windham.”

The dead dog had stiffened since Danny last saw him-he was the husky-shepherd mix, the one Rooster had killed. The dog lay fully extended, with a frozen snarl, on the dining-room table. One of the dog’s paws, contorted by rigor mortis, pressed flat the note Danny had composed to the hippie carpenter. Where Danny had typed, “Enough is enough, okay?” the hippie had replied in longhand.

“Don’t tell me-let me guess,” the writer said to the state trooper. “I’ll bet the asshole wrote, ‘Fuck you!’-or words to that effect.”

“That’s what he wrote, Danny,” Jimmy said. “I guess you know him.”

Roland Drake-that asshole! Danny was thinking. Armando DeSimone had been right. Roland Drake had been one of Danny’s writing students at Windham College, albeit briefly. Drake had dropped the course after his first teacher’s conference, when Danny told the arrogant young fuck that good writing could rarely be accomplished without revision. Roland Drake wrote first-draft gibberish-he had a halfway decent imagination, but he was sloppy. He paid no attention to specific details, or to the language.

“I’m into writing, not rewriting,” Drake had told Danny. “I only like the creative part.”

“But rewriting is writing,” Danny said to the young man. “Sometimes, rewriting is the most creative part.”

Roland Drake had sneered and walked out of Danny’s office. That had been their only conversation. The boy hadn’t been as hairy then; perhaps Drake hadn’t been as drawn to the hippie persuasion when he was younger. And Danny had trouble recognizing people he previously knew. That was a real problem with being famous: You were always meeting people for what you thought was the first time, but they would remember that they’d already met you. It was probably an additional insult to Drake that Danny hadn’t remembered him-not just that Danny had told Drake to mind his dog (or dogs).

“Yes, I know Roland Drake,” Danny said to Jimmy. He told the state trooper the story-including the part about Rooster killing the dog that now lay stiffly on the dining-room table. From Danny’s typed note, Jimmy could see for himself how the writer had tried to make peace with the asshole hippie. The writer carpenter, as Armando had called him, didn’t know when enough was enough-no more than Roland Drake knew that rewriting was writing, and that it could be the most creative part of the process.

Danny and Jimmy went through the rest of the main house, turning off lights, putting things in order. In Joe’s bathroom, the bathtub had been filled. The water was cold, but there was no mess; there’d been no spills. In Joe’s bedroom, one of the boy’s wrestling-team photos had been removed from the picture hook on the wall and was propped up (by a pillow) against the headboard of the bed. In Danny’s bathroom, one of his suit jackets (on a coat hanger) had been hung on the shower-curtain rod; his electric razor and a pair of dress shoes were in the otherwise-empty bathtub. All the bath towels were piled at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom.

“Drake is just a shit-disturber, Danny,” the trooper told him. “He’s a little trust-fund fuck-they never dare to do any real damage, because they know their parents would end up having to pay for it.”

The same small nuisances were everywhere, throughout the house. When they went to turn the lights out in the garage, Danny discovered a tube of toothpaste on the driver’s seat of Joe’s car; a toothbrush was tucked under the driver’s-side sun visor.

There was more of the same juvenile mischief in the guesthouse-the original farmhouse-where the music had been cranked up as loud as it would go and the soundless TV was on. Lamps were tipped on their sides, a pyramid of lampshades decorated the kitchen table, several pictures had been rehung (upside down), and the beds were unmade-in a manner that made you think someone had slept in them.

“This is irritating, but it’s mainly childish,” Danny said to the trooper.

“I agree,” Jimmy said.

“I’m selling the whole property anyway,” Danny told him.

“Not because of this, I hope,” the state trooper said.

“No, but this makes it easier,” the writer answered. Because Danny knew he was moving away, and the Putney property would have to be sold, maybe Roland Drake’s violation of the writer’s personal effects felt like less of an invasion than it truly was-that is, until Danny and Jimmy came to the famous author’s writing shack. Yes, all the lights were on, and some papers had been misplaced, but Drake had overstepped; he’d done some actual harm.

Danny had been proofreading the galleys of East of Bangor. As testimony to the novelist’s ceaseless need to rewrite-to tamper with, to endlessly revise-Danny had written more than the usual number of notes and queries in the margins of the galleys. This demonstration-namely, that Danny Angel was both a writer and a rewriter-must have been too much to take for a failed writer (a writer carpenter) like Roland Drake. The evidence of rewriting in the galleys of Danny’s soon-to-be-published next novel had pushed Drake over the edge.

With a Sharpie permanent marker, in deep black, Roland Drake had scrawled on the cover of the uncorrected proofs of East of Bangor, and inside the galleys, on every page, Drake had written his comments with a Sharpie fine-point red pen. Not that the writer carpenter’s commentary was either insightful or elaborate, but Drake had taken the time to defile every page; there were more than four hundred pages in the galleys of East of Bangor. Danny had proofread three quarters of the novel, and-notwithstanding what a rewriter he was-he’d written notes or queries on only about fifteen or twenty of the pages. Roland Drake had crossed out Danny’s notes and queries; he’d rendered the author’s revisions unreadable. Drake had purposely made a mess of the galleys, but it needn’t have cost Danny more than two weeks’ additional work-not even that, under normal circumstances, though Drake’s destruction of the writer’s uncorrected proofs seemed greater than a merely symbolic assault.

But at a time when the cook and his son were confronted with the chaos of going on the run again, Roland Drake’s attack on Danny’s sixth novel might delay the publication of East of Bangor by several months-conceivably, for as long as half a year. The novel was scheduled to be published in the fall of ’83. (Maybe not now-possibly, the book wouldn’t be published until the winter of ’84. With all that was newly happening in Danny’s life, it would take the author a while to remember the revisions he’d already made in the galleys-and to find the time to proofread the last quarter of the novel.)

“Revise the chickenshit title!” Drake had scribbled on the cover of East of Bangor, in deep black. “Change the author’s fake name!”

And in red, throughout the novel, while the writer carpenter’s criticism demonstrated no great range or in-depth perception, Drake had underlined a phrase or circled a word-on four-hundred-plus pages-and he’d added a cryptic comment, albeit only one per page. “This sucks!” and “Rewrite!” were the most repeated, along with “Cut!” and “Dog-killer!” Less common were “Lame!” and “Feeble!” More than once, “Lengthy!” had been scrawled across the entire page. Only twice, but memorably, Drake had written, “I fucked Franky, too!” (Perhaps Drake had slept with Franky, Danny only now considered; that might have contributed to the onetime writing student’s animosity toward the bestselling author.)

“Have a look, Jimmy,” Danny said to the trooper, handing him the desecrated copy of the galleys.

“Gee… this makes more work for you, I suppose,” Jimmy said, turning the pages. “‘Year of the Dog wouldn’t publish this shit!’” the state trooper read aloud, with deadpan puzzlement. Jimmy always looked pained by what he didn’t understand-at once heartbroken and baffled. For a cop who’d shot his share of dogs, Jimmy had the sad, droopy eyes of a Labrador retriever; tall and thin, with a long face, the trooper looked questioningly at Danny for some explanation of Roland Drake’s ravings.

“Year of the Dog was a small literary magazine,” Danny explained. “Either Windham College published it, or it was independently published by some Windham College students-I can’t remember.”

“Franky is a girl?” Jimmy asked, reading further.

“Yes,” the writer answered.

“That young woman who lived here for a while-that one, right?” the trooper asked.

“That’s her, Jimmy.”

“‘You write with a limp!’” Jimmy read aloud. “Gee…”

“Drake should bury his own dog-don’t you think, Jimmy?” Danny asked the trooper.

“I’ll take Roland’s dog back to him. We’ll have a little talk,” Jimmy said. “You could get a restraining order-”

“I don’t need one, Jimmy-I’m leaving, remember?” Danny said.

“I know how to talk to Roland,” the trooper said.

“Just watch out for the other dog, Jimmy-he comes at you from behind,” Danny warned him.

“I won’t shoot him if I don’t have to, Danny-I only shoot them when I have to,” the trooper said.

“I know,” Danny told him.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone out to get your dad,” Jimmy ventured. “I can’t conceive of someone having a score to settle with the cook. You want to tell me about that, Danny?” the cop asked.

Here was another intersection in the road, the writer thought. What were these junctions, where making a sharp-left or sharp-right turn from the previously chosen path presented a tempting possibility? Hadn’t there been an opportunity for Danny and his dad to go back to Twisted River, as if nothing had ever happened to Injun Jane? And of course there was the case of putting Paul Polcari back in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli with Ketchum’s single-shot 20-gauge-instead of putting someone back there who might have pulled the fucking trigger!

Well, wasn’t this another opportunity to escape the conundrum? Just tell Jimmy everything! About Injun Jane, about Carl and Six-Pack Pam-about the retired deputy with his long-barreled Colt.45, that fucking cowboy! Short of asking Ketchum to kill the bastard, what other way out was there? And Danny knew that if he or his dad asked Ketchum outright, Ketchum would kill the cowboy. The old logger hadn’t murdered Lucky Pinette in his bed with a stamping hammer; Lucky was probably asleep at the time, but the killer couldn’t have been Ketchum, or there would be nothing holding Ketchum back from killing Carl.

But all Danny said to his state-trooper friend was, “It’s about a woman. A long time ago, my dad was sleeping with a logging-camp constable’s girlfriend. Later, the camp constable became a county deputy sheriff-and when he found out what had happened to his girlfriend, he came looking for my dad. The deputy is retired now, but we have reason to believe he might still be looking-he’s crazy.”

“A crazy ex-cop… that’s not good,” Jimmy said.

“The former deputy sheriff is getting old-that’s the good part. He can’t keep looking much longer,” Danny told the trooper, who looked thoughtful; Jimmy also seemed suspicious.

There was more to the story, of course, and the state trooper probably could discern this in the writer’s atypically vague telling of the tale. (And what trouble could Danny have gotten into for killing a woman he mistook for a bear when he’d been a twelve-year-old?) But Danny didn’t say more about it, and Jimmy could tell that his friend was content to keep the matter to himself and his dad. Besides, there was a dead dog to deal with; the business at hand, giving Roland Drake a good talking-to, must have seemed more pressing to the state trooper.

“Have you got some of those large green garbage bags?” Jimmy asked. “I’ll take care of that dog for you. Why don’t you get a little sleep, Danny? We can talk more about the crazy old ex-cop when you want to.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” Danny told his friend. Just like that, the writer was thinking, he’d driven past the intersection in the road. It hadn’t even been in the category of a decision, but now the cook and his son could only keep driving. And how old was the cowboy, anyway? Carl was the same age as Ketchum, who was the same age as Six-Pack Pam. The retired deputy sheriff was sixty-six, not too old to squeeze a trigger-not yet.

From his driveway, Danny watched the taillights of the state-police patrol car as Jimmy drove off on Hickory Ridge Road. It wouldn’t take the trooper long to get to Roland Drake’s driveway of abandoned vehicles, and Drake’s surviving husky-shepherd mix. Suddenly, it meant a lot to Danny to know what was going to happen when Jimmy brought the dead dog back to the asshole hippie. Would that really be the end of it? Was enough ever enough, or did the violence just perpetuate-that is, whenever something began violently?

Danny had to know. He got in his car and drove up Hickory Ridge Road until he spotted the trooper’s taillights flickering ahead of him; then Danny slowed down. He could no longer keep the squad car’s taillights in sight, but he kept following at a distance. Jimmy had probably seen Danny’s headlights, albeit briefly. Surely the state policeman would have known he was being followed; knowing Jimmy, he would have guessed it was Danny, too. But Danny knew that he didn’t need to see what happened when the trooper pulled into Roland Drake’s salvage yard of a driveway. The writer knew he needed only to be near enough to hear the shot, if there was a shot.

IT TURNED OUT THAT Danny and his dad had more time than they knew, but they were wise not to count on it. They listened to Ketchum this time. For hadn’t Ketchum been right the last time? Vermont wasn’t far enough away from New Hampshire, as the old woodsman had told them. Would Dot and May have wandered into Mao’s, in Iowa City? Not likely. For that matter, Danny wondered whether anyone from Coos County ever would have found the cook and his son in Boulder, Colorado, where Joe would soon be going to school. Also unlikely, but the writer was persuaded not to take that chance, though leaving the country wouldn’t be easy-not the way Ketchum meant it, because the logger had something permanent in mind. (Ketchum also had an idea about where.)

Ketchum had called the cook and his son, in the logger’s hungover or fragile sobriety of the morning following Dot and May’s calamitous visit to Avellino. Of course Ketchum phoned them individually, but it was irritating how the woodsman spoke to each of them as if both Danny and his dad were there.

“For thirteen years, the cowboy believed you two were in Toronto -because Carl thought that was where Angel was from, right? You bet I’m right!” Ketchum bellowed.

Dear God, the cook was thinking in his beloved kitchen at Avellino, where he’d made himself a very strong espresso and was wondering why Ketchum couldn’t resist shouting to make himself heard. According to Ketchum, Dot and May had sizably less imagination than a pinch of coon shit; while “the gossip-feeding bitches” would definitely tell the cowboy what they knew, they wouldn’t agree with each other about how to tell him, or when. Dot would be in favor of waiting until the retired deputy did something particularly obnoxious, or he was behaving in a superior fashion, whereas May would want to insinuate that she knew something-until Carl was crazy to know what it was. In short, the old broads’ habits of mean-spirited manipulation might buy Danny and his dad a little time.

On the phone to Danny, Ketchum was more exact: “Here’s the point, you two. Now that Carl knows you went to Boston, not Toronto -and he’ll know soon enough that you then went to Vermont -the cowboy would never believe that you’re in Toronto. That’s the last place he’d look-that’s where you should go! They speak English in Toronto. You’ve got a publisher there, don’t you, Danny? And I imagine there’s lots of jobs for a cook-something not Italian, Cookie, or I swear I’ll come shoot you myself!”

I’m not Cookie, Danny almost said, but he just held the phone.

Toronto wasn’t such a bad idea, the writer Danny Angel was thinking, as he waited out the mounting hysteria of Ketchum’s phone call. Danny had been there on a book tour or two. It was a good city, he was thinking-to the degree that Danny thought about cities at all. (The cook was more of a city guy than his son.) Canada was a foreign country, thus satisfying Ketchum’s criterion, but Toronto was near enough to the States to make keeping in touch with Joe possible; Colorado would be easy to get to from Toronto. Of course, Danny wanted to know what Joe might think of the idea-not to mention what the cook thought of Ketchum’s suggestion.

After Ketchum ended his call to Danny, the writer’s telephone rang almost immediately. Naturally, it was Danny’s dad.

“There will be no peace while that lunatic has his own phone, Daniel,” the cook said to his son. “And if he ever gets a fax machine, we will be doomed to be addressed in capital letters and exclamation points for the rest of our lives.”

“But what do you think of Ketchum’s idea, Dad? What about Toronto?” Danny asked.

“I don’t care where we go-I’m just sorry to have dragged you into this. I was only trying to keep you safe!” his father said; then the cook started to cry. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” Tony Angel said. “I love it here!”

“I know you do-I’m sorry, Pop. But we’ll be okay in Toronto -I know we will,” the writer told his father.

“I can’t ask Ketchum to kill Carl, Daniel-I just can’t do it,” the cook told his son.

“I know-I can’t ask him, either,” Danny said.

“You do have a publisher in Canada, don’t you, Daniel?” his dad asked. For the first time, Danny could hear something old-something approaching elderly-in his father’s voice. The cook was almost sixty, but what Danny had heard in his dad’s voice sounded older than that; he’d heard something more than anxious, something almost frail. “If you have a publisher in Toronto,” his father was saying, “I’m sure he’ll help us get settled in there, won’t he?”

“She-my Canadian publisher is a she,” Danny told his dad. “I know she’ll help us, Pop-it’ll be easy there. And we’ll get a place in Colorado, where we can visit Joe-and Joe can come visit us. We don’t have to think of this move as necessarily permanent-not for a while, anyway. We’ll just see how we like it in Canada, okay?”

“Okay,” the cook said, but he was still crying.

I could leave Vermont today, the writer was thinking. Danny did not feel an attachment to his Putney property that nearly approximated his dad’s love of Avellino in Brattleboro, or his father’s life there. After Dot and May’s appearance in the restaurant-not to mention Roland Drake’s visit, and Drake’s dead dog on the dining-room table-Danny felt that he could leave Vermont forever, and never look back.

When Carl eventually encountered those bad old broads Dot and May, the cowboy would get to Vermont too late. With Armando and Mary DeSimone’s help, Danny had sold the Putney property by then; there was no writer’s compound remaining on Hickory Ridge Road. And Windham College, where the writer Danny Angel had taught, was a college with a different name (and purpose) now- Landmark College, a leading institution for learning-disabled students. By the time the cowboy showed up in Brattleboro, Avellino itself would be gone-and wherever Greg, the sous chef, went, Carl wouldn’t find him. At the cook’s urging, Celeste and her daughter, Loretta (and Loretta’s kid), left town. The cowboy would come up empty, once again, but there was no question that Dot and May had blabbed their best to him.

Was it possible that Carl was as much of an imbecile as Ketchum had, at times, maintained? Did the cowboy possess no better detective skills than those of Ketchum’s much-maligned pinch of coon shit? Or was it simply that, throughout the retired deputy’s investigations in Vermont, the Angel name had not come up? In Brattleboro, evidently, the cowboy had not inquired about the cook and his son at The Book Cellar!

“You knew Cookie was in Vermont -you knew it all along, didn’t you, Ketchum?” Carl would one day ask the old logger.

“Cookie? Is he still around?” Ketchum said to the cowboy. “I wouldn’t have figured that a little fella with a limp like his would be so long-lasting-would you, Carl?”

“Keep it up, Ketchum-you just keep it up,” Carl said.

“Oh, I will-I’ll keep it up, all right,” Ketchum told the cowboy.

But Danny couldn’t wait to leave Vermont; after the night he and Jimmy found the dead dog on the writer’s dining-room table, Danny Angel wanted to be gone.

That night he’d driven no farther out the back road to Westminster West than the bottom of Barrett’s long, uphill driveway. He had backed his car onto the animal lover’s property. Danny knew that Barrett went to bed early, and that she wouldn’t be aware of a car parked in her driveway-so far away from her horse farm that not even her horses would be disturbed by its presence. Besides, Danny had turned off the engine and his headlights. He just sat in the car, which was facing Westminster West with all the windows open.

It was a warm, windless night. Danny knew he could hear a gunshot for a couple of miles on such a night. What he didn’t know at first was: Did he really want to hear it? And what would hearing or not hearing that gunshot signify, exactly? It was more than the survival or the death of Roland Drake’s bite-you-from-behind husky-shepherd mix that the writer was listening for.

At forty-one, Danny felt like a twelve-year-old all over again; it didn’t help that it had started to rain. He remembered the misty night he and his dad had left Twisted River in the Pontiac Chieftain-how he’d sat waiting in the station wagon, which was parked near Six-Pack Pam’s. Danny had been listening for the discharge of Carl’s Colt.45, which would mean his dad was dead. Upon the sound of that shot, the boy would have run up the stairs to Six-Pack’s place; he would have begged her to let him in, and then Ketchum would have taken care of him. That had been the plan, and Danny had done his part; he’d sat in the car, in the falling rain, waiting to hear the gunshot that never came, though there were times when Danny felt he was still waiting to hear it.

On the back road to Westminster West-at the foot of his former lover’s driveway-the writer Danny Angel was listening as alertly as he could. He was hoping he would never hear that shot-the earsplitting discharge of the cowboy’s Colt.45-but it was with that shot in mind that the writer began to indulge the dangerous, what-if side of his imagination. What if the state trooper didn’t have to shoot Roland Drake’s other dog-what if, somehow, Jimmy could persuade the writer carpenter and his shepherd-husky mix that, truly, enough was enough? Might that signify an end to the violence, or to the threat of violence?

It was then that the writer was aware of what he was listening for: nothing. It was nothing that he hoped he would hear. It was the no-shot that might mean his dad would be safe-that the cowboy, like Paul Polcari, might never pull the trigger.

Danny was trying not to think about what Jimmy had told him-this was concerning the tube of toothpaste and the toothbrush in Joe’s car. Possibly, they’d not been put there by Roland Drake; maybe the toothpaste and the toothbrush hadn’t been part of Drake’s mischief.

“I hate to tell you this, Danny, but I’ve busted lots of kids who’ve been drinking in their cars,” the trooper had said. “The kids often have toothpaste and a toothbrush handy-so their parents don’t smell what they’ve been drinking on their breath, when they come home.” But Danny preferred to think that the toothpaste and the toothbrush had been more of Drake’s childish business. The writer didn’t like to think about his son drinking and driving.

Was Danny superstitious? (Most writers who believe in plot are.) Danny didn’t like to think about what Lady Sky had said to Joe, either. “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” she’d said to the two-year-old, kissing his forehead. Well, not on a night as dark as this one, the writer thought. On a night as dark as this one, no skydiver-not even Lady Sky-could see where to land.

Now the rain had blotted out what little moonlight there was; the rain was coming in the open windows of Danny’s car, and the water had beaded on the windshield, which made the darkness more impenetrable.

Surely, the state trooper had already arrived in Drake’s junkyard of a driveway. And what would Jimmy do then? Danny was wondering. Just sit in the patrol car until Drake had noticed the car was there and came outside to talk to him? (And would Roland have come out alone, or would he have brought the back-biting dog with him?) Then again, it was raining; out of consideration for the hippie carpenter, and because it was late, the trooper might have gotten out of his car and knocked on Drake’s door.

At that thought came a knocking on the passenger-side door of Danny’s car; a flashlight shone in the writer’s face. “Oh, heart be still-it’s just you,” he heard Barrett say. His former lover, who was carrying a rifle, opened the car door and slipped inside to sit beside him. She was wearing her knee-high rubber stable boots and an oil-skin poncho. She’d pushed back the hood when she got into the car, and her long white hair was unbraided-as if she’d gone to bed hours ago, and had suddenly been woken up. Barrett’s thighs were bare; under the poncho, she was wearing nothing. (Danny knew, of course, that Barrett slept naked.) “Were you missing me, Danny?” she asked him.

“You’re up late, aren’t you?” Danny asked her.

“About an hour ago, I had to put one of my horses down-it was too late to call the bloody vet,” Barrett told him. She sat like a man, with her knees spread apart; the carbine, with the barrel pointed to the floor, rested between her pretty dancer’s legs. It was an old bolt-action Remington-a.30-06 Springfield, she’d explained to him, some years ago, when she’d shown up on his Putney property, where she was hunting deer. Barrett still hunted deer there; there was an untended apple orchard on the land, and Barrett had shot more than one deer in that orchard. (What had the cook called her-a “selective” animal lover, was it? Danny knew more than a few like her.)

“I’m sorry about your horse,” he told her.

“I’m sorry about the gun-I know you don’t like guns,” she said. “But I didn’t recognize your car-it’s new, I guess-and one should take some precaution when there are strange men parked in one’s driveway.”

“Yes, I was missing you,” Danny lied. “I’m leaving Vermont. Maybe I was just trying to remember it, before I go.” This last bit was true. Besides, the fiction writer couldn’t tell such a selective animal lover the dead-dog story-not to mention that he was waiting to hear the fate of a second dog-not on such a gloomy night as the one Dot and May had created, anyway.

“You’re leaving?” Barrett asked him. “Why? I thought you liked it here-your dad loves his place in Brattleboro, doesn’t he?”

“We’re both leaving. We’re… lonely, I guess,” Danny told her.

“Tell me about it,” Barrett said; she let the butt of the gun rest against her thigh while she took one of Danny’s hands and guided it under the poncho, to her breast. She was so small-as petite as Katie had been, the writer realized-and in the silvery light of the blotted-out moon, in the near-total darkness of the car’s interior, Barrett’s white hair shone like the hair of Katie’s ghost.

“I must have wanted to say good-bye,” Danny said to her. He meant it, actually-this wasn’t untrue. Might it not be a comfort to lie in the lithe, older woman’s warm arms, and not think about anything else?

“You’re sweet,” Barrett said to him. “You’re much too sad for my taste, but you’re very sweet.”

Danny kissed her on the mouth, the shock of her extremely white hair casting a ghostly glow on her narrow face, which she’d turned up to him while she closed her pale-gray, ice-cold eyes. This allowed Danny to look past her, out the open window of the car; he wanted to be sure he saw Jimmy’s state-police cruiser if it passed by on the road.

How long did it take to deliver a dead dog to the animal’s owner, and to deliver whatever lecture Jimmy had in mind for the asshole hippie? Danny was wondering. Almost certainly, if the trooper was going to be forced to shoot Drake’s other dog, Danny would already have heard the shot; he’d been listening and listening for it, even over his conversation with Barrett. (It was better to kiss her than to talk; the kissing was quiet. There would be no missing the gunshot, if there was one.)

“Let’s go up to my house,” Barrett murmured to him, breaking away from the kiss. “I just shot my horse-I want to take a bath.”

“Sure,” Danny said, but he didn’t reach for the key in the ignition. The squad car hadn’t driven past Barrett’s driveway, and there’d been no shot.

The writer tried to imagine them-Jimmy and the writer carpenter. Maybe the trooper and Roland Drake, that trust-fund fuck, were sitting at the hippie’s kitchen table. Danny tried to envision Jimmy patting the husky-shepherd mix, or possibly scratching the dog’s soft ears-most dogs liked it when you did that. But Danny had trouble seeing such a scene; that was why he hesitated before starting his car.

“What is it?” Barrett asked him.

The shot was louder than he’d expected; though Drake’s driveway was two or three miles away, Danny had underestimated the sound of Jimmy’s gun. (He’d been thinking that the trooper carried a.38, but-not knowing guns, handguns especially-Danny didn’t know that Jimmy liked a.475 Wildey Magnum, also known as the Wildey Survivor.) There was a muffled bang-even bigger than the cowboy’s Colt.45, Danny only realized as Barrett flinched in his arms, her fingers locating but scarcely touching the trigger of her Remington.

“Some bloody poacher-I’ll give Jimmy a call in the morning,” Barrett said; she had relaxed again in his arms.

“Why call Jimmy?” Danny asked her. “Why not the game warden?”

“The game warden is worthless-the bloody fool is afraid of poachers,” Barrett said. “Besides, Jimmy knows who all the poachers are. They’re all afraid of him.”

“Oh,” was all Danny could say. He didn’t know anything about poachers.

Danny started the engine; he turned on his headlights and the windshield wipers, and he and Barrett put up the windows of the car. The writer turned around in the road and headed up the long driveway to the horse farm-not knowing which piece of the puzzle was missing, and not sure what part of the story was still ongoing.

One thing was clear, as Barrett sat beside him with the carbine now across her lap, the short barrel of the lightweight rifle pointed at the passenger-side door. Enough was never enough; there would be no stopping the violence.