The Cookbook Collector

“You know Dad thought the Zylberfenigs were creepy,” Sam reminded her.

Barbara could not deny this.

“He thought Bialystokers were a cult. That’s what he told me,” Annie said. Barbara saw her daughter take a breath and turn pale behind her freckles. “We think that Dad wouldn’t want them in the house.”

Barbara placed her coffee cup gently on the granite kitchen counter. She had been a devoted stay-at-home mother, an involved parent—overinvolved, Mel used to say, when she drove hours every weekend for soccer league, stayed up all night sewing costumes, troubleshooting projects for the science fair. She had been a weeper, crying at every milestone and graduation. Even after the kids had left home, she’d longed for them, rejoicing intensely in their triumphs, hurting and worrying for them when they stumbled. In a real sense she’d lived for them. And now? Grief changed her perspective. Trauma provided sudden distance. Now Barbara looked at Annie and saw a young woman needing a haircut, and probably a new young man as well, someone who might find a way to fly east for his girlfriend’s father’s memorial.

“We were just thinking of what Dad would want,” said Annie.

Oh, really, young lady, Barbara thought. You have a lot of nerve. Did you and your brother get together and figure out what to say? Not very sensitive. Not very thoughtful. Not very bright! But she said none of this. She told Annie mildly, “Your father would want me to do whatever helps.”

Do what you have to do. Whatever works. Whatever helps. People said this, Orion mused, but they didn’t mean it literally. They didn’t mean, for example, go out and get high, or buy a gun and shoot someone. They were thinking more along the lines of go ahead and eat ice cream for dinner, carve a pumpkin, drive to western Mass. for apple picking. None of which appealed.

His anger did not subside. The pain only increased. Losing Jonathan, he had lost a year’s work as well. His friend, mentor, and rival dead, his tools repurposed for millennial cyberwars, Orion left the memorial service in such a fury, he didn’t know where to go or what to do. He took his father to the train station.

“Take it easy,” Lou told him as they hugged good-bye.

“I can’t,” Orion said.

He sped back to Boston, but he didn’t get a ticket. His wheels screeched as he turned off Memorial Drive onto Vassar Street. He hit a pothole that nearly sent his car flying, but he didn’t spin out of control. He pulled over and parked illegally in MIT’s West Annex Lot. Train tracks ran behind the fence. Every night at nine-thirty a train shuffled past.

He paced the lot, waiting. An hour passed. Two hours passed. At last he heard the horns and jingling bells at the railway crossing a block away, and then the steady shuffling engine.

He sprinted through the parking lot to the cyclone fence that ran along the tracks, and pounced, clawing metal, cutting his right hand, as the train barreled past. Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus. The circus had come to town. He watched the long silver train snake past. What did those cars contain? Tents and tigers, ponies, acrobats, sequined costumes, feather plumes. His father had written a circus poem. “The Circus Animals Return after Successful Contract Negotiations.” How did it go? The troupe returns / Those shopworn joys … His mother had taken him to the circus once, and he had learned to juggle. He had gone through a juggling phase as a child. In high school he got pretty good. He used to irritate his mother while she was cooking. He’d juggle a grapefruit and an avocado and a lemon. Sometimes a cantaloupe. Persimmons tended to explode.

He ran to the Store 24 in Central Square and looked for fruit. Store 24 was excellent because the fruit was so hard. None of it was ripe.

“Anything else?” the salesgirl asked, as she rang up four apples and a preternaturally orange orange.

At first he didn’t recognize her. He thought she was a new cashier. Then he saw that she was the same dark-eyed girl who always worked there. The same girl with one difference. She wasn’t wearing her head scarf anymore. Her hair was reddish-brown, bobbed to the chin. Couldn’t be, he told himself. But she was wearing her barrette with the tiny rhinestone diamond, fastened in her hair just above the ear.

She eyed him nervously. “Would you like a bag?”

He shook his head. He looked at the orange and the apples on the counter, and he didn’t want them. He had no desire to juggle anymore.

He walked out into the night, and he thought, Why not? Why not leave the store and the city with its muddy river and its squares of college students? He would leave. He would leave them all behind. His apartment with its splintering roof deck, his convenience store, his frightened cashier, his future in-laws who were already planning for Thanksgiving, his so-called friends who’d cut him loose. The so-called ISIS family. The so-called ISIS team. The company had never been his family, and he’d never understood the rules if, indeed, there were any. Think like Jonathan. He knew exactly how Jonathan thought: How do I raise hell today?

“I’m leaving ISIS,” he told Molly when he got home.

“I know.” She was sitting in the living room watching the news.

He took the remote and turned off the television.

“Really leaving.”

“You say that every day.”

“I can’t be there anymore. I can’t work there anymore.”

Wearily, Molly turned to look at him. “You can’t do anything,” she said. “You can’t cook. You can’t clean. You can’t move. You can’t grow up. What is the matter with you?”

Orion didn’t answer.

“You barely live here anymore.”

“You should talk,” Orion shot back.

“I’m working!”

“And I’ve been working too.”

“Right, and now you want to stop. What’s your plan, Orion?”

“I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I don’t want a plan. That’s the difference between us. You’re the planner. Your parents are the planners. Not me.”

“It is eleven o’clock at night,” Molly said.

“So?”

“So it’s been five hours since the memorial service ended. Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” said Orion.

“Nowhere? Do you think you might have called me?”

“I might have,” said Orion.

“You knew I was home tonight. You knew that I’d be here.” She got off the couch and began brushing crumbs off the cushions onto the floor. “I am so tired of waiting for you. I’m always waiting for you. For six years, I’ve been working and training and waiting for you, and you don’t care, you don’t want to be with me, you don’t …” Tears started in Molly’s eyes. “We were best friends, weren’t we? We used to tell each other everything. When I was upset I could come to you. When you had problems you would confide in me. But now you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t even want to look at me. All you want to do is run away.”

“If I’d wanted to run, I would have run already,” Orion said.

“Would have? You did! You already have. You run away from me every day.”

You make it easy, Orion thought.

Molly rubbed the tears from her eyes. “What if the whole world were like you? What if everybody ran away? What if all the doctors said, ‘I can’t treat you because I’m afraid of blood’? And the Army said, ‘We can’t fight to defend you, because somebody could die’?

“Wake up, Orion. Life is messy! The world is messy. And I’m sorry, but people get killed. Even people you and I know. And you can keep on working and try to make things right, or you can give up and make some random tragedy into an excuse for following your original plan—which was to do as little as possible.”

He heard his mother in Molly’s voice. He heard his mother’s anguished pragmatism. Please don’t sit around. Don’t sleep the day away. You’re wasting light. Molly’s words were angry, but also heartfelt, and he heard their truth.

The truth was not nearly enough. His mother’s admonitions were not enough. The old goat, his father,