Time passed.

He’d read that phrase before and been annoyed—time passed? well, no shit, Sherlock—but now Avery got it. In the spring of Nona’s leaving, in the twenty days since she had been gone, not much had happened at all. Time passed. He was back at the pita restaurant, no hard feelings with the manager, who just wanted someone who could fry falafel and prep the eighteen different toppings with no questions asked. He was back living with the friend-of-a-friend roommate, sleeping on a futon, in a one-bedroom on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. Grandad got worse and then better and then worse, in increments so small they hardly mattered, and when he was flown back to Chicago, Avery hadn’t even gone out to Hartfield to say good-bye or watch it happen. He hadn’t done it not because he couldn’t manage the good-bye but because there was no need for a good-bye, not yet, anyway.

Avery was headed home, too.

There were two pork tenderloins baking away, sweating in their sage and applesauce. He had crusty rolls from Zabar’s on the counter to slice, and a mustard-apple-horseradish sauce going on the stove. Avery checked the dial on the internal thermometer (his own)—yep, 350 on the dot—and marveled, once again, at the power and precision of this oven.

“God, I’m going to miss this kitchen,” he muttered.

“It’ll miss you too, no doubt.”

Avery whirled around to see Winnie there behind him. Fuck. What was it about little old women, always so quiet and tiptoey? “Quit sneaking up on me. Jesus.”

“Did you want any of these?” Winnie had a crazy-looking handkerchief tied on her head like Little Red Riding Hood, and she held out a bunch of ties. “I found them in a drawer. Whoops. Thought I’d packed up everything.”

“Um—do you want me to take them?” Avery felt a little bad about that I’ll-miss-the-kitchen comment. “Take them back to Chicago?”

“Would you wear them?”

“Probably not.” Ties were not exactly his look. Jerry’s wide old seventies-era ties especially.

Winnie stuffed them all into a plastic bag, and her lack of ceremony took Avery back. “He won’t need them” is all she said.

He turned back to the bubbling applesauce and lowered the heat a touch. So, she was organizing and he was cooking. Standard modes of operation for both. But did Winnie feel as dead and empty inside? Avery wasn’t going to ask anything about it. When that message had come from Rich, saying that Grandad was going home, his first thought was that some crazy legal victory had finally given his mom her way. But piece by piece, the story came out: how Winnie had arranged it, how she’d decided to let him die there, instead of here. An incredible act of generosity, Rich had called it. (No word yet from his mom.) Avery’s point of view was mixed: Had Winnie really come to believe she should share Grandad? Had she discussed this with the old man, before he stopped understanding everything? What would he have thought—what would he have wanted? Although maybe, Avery saw, these last didn’t matter anymore.

It’s true that part of him wished Winnie had put up more of a fight—where was that old lady who took on the town over a tree in her yard?—but…whatever. Who was he to talk? Avery could barely muster the energy to get on the train to come out here, and he was hardly doltish enough to compare his loss to hers. In any case, he just couldn’t go there. This was lunch and lunch only. He certainly wasn’t going to do some big emotional recap, their glory days out here in Hartfield, that kind of thing.

Besides, she looked okay. Tired, and she wouldn’t sit down, but okay. At least her friends were coming around now; a couple other little old ladies had been here earlier, but they hustled out as soon as he arrived from the train—he walked, carrying the groceries—smiling twinkly smiles and patting him on the arm. God, I need some guy friends is what he had thought, doing the chat thing with these short, wrinkled women.

“I have enough food for everyone,” he’d protested to Winnie after they left. “Did I scare them off?”

She sorted mail, reading each piece of junk. “They want us to bond,” she said absently.

Last night Avery had walked downtown to NYU and wandered in and out of dorms and class buildings that lined Washington Square Park until he found the right lecture hall. There he sat in the back and listened to speaker after speaker read in a monotone from pages they barely looked up from. He would have been hard-pressed to say what they were discussing, since the topics were obscured by sentences so thick and dense they might as well have been in German, for all Avery could understand. Or Chinese. Man, if this was the kind of shit college led to, he had to pat himself on the back for passing it up. Although the fact that everyone around him seemed to be paying attention, listening carefully to this nonsense put him on edge; he hated feeling that his lack of an education marked him out.

Thomas’s presentation was just as garbled and boring as the others, though Avery tried, once or twice, to nod at what he imagined were especially good points. He felt a surge of goodwill for this thin middle-aged man who could be such a pisser. Thomas finished his paper with a flourish, and got slightly red-faced when the polite, scattered applause came. He smoothed his sparse hair down in a self-conscious gesture Avery had seen him perform a hundred times.

At the little wine-and-cheese social afterward, Avery waited until Thomas was free and then came up to him and stuck his hand out.

“Oh my God in heaven,” Thomas said, with a bit more shocked surprise than Avery felt was really necessary. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m a regular at these things. Can’t pass them up. Especially when the subject is—” He glanced at the brochure and read aloud. “‘Image Theory, Image Culture: Re(Con)Textualizing the Image.’”

“Is that so.”

“That’s good shit. And yours was the best of the bunch. You wiped the stage with them, Tom.”

“Don’t call me Tom.”

“Sorry. Dr. Friedelson.”

Thomas scanned the crowd, and then popped a cherry tomato in his mouth. “You’ve heard from our fine Italian lady friend, then,” he asked, nonchalant, looking down. The older gay man’s carefully casual tone nearly broke Avery’s heart. “We’ve been e-mailing. Apparently there’s been quite a bit of rain, but that’s to be expected, this time of the season.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, it can be torrential. Hi! One second!” Thomas straightened up, his face bright again, ready to go on with his doctorly schmoozing.

“Listen, I just came by because…actually, I’m heading back to Chicago, next week sometime.”

“You are?” Thomas scanned his face. “Just for a visit or—”

“No, for real.”

“Because of—Nona? Does she know?”

Avery held his smile steady, with effort. “And so I just wanted to say—well. You know. Thanks, and everything. And take care,” he added, but as an afterthought because, to his great amazement, Thomas put his arms around him and gave him a real and sudden hug. Avery felt himself hugging him back, and it wasn’t nearly as weird as he would have thought it would be—this whole-body embrace of another dude (a gay dude, nonetheless)—right there in public, in the stuffy ground-floor conference room by the cheese-and-grapes table.

“This sucks,” Thomas said, finally releasing him. He wiped his eyes with the tip of a napkin.

Avery agreed, not even sure what Thomas was referring to. “Yeah, it does,” he said, his throat aching.

While the pork was resting on a cutting board, he cooked the apples down until they were a quivering gold mush. He took a couple of containers out of the fridge—peppery jicama slaw and a plain butter-lettuce salad—and set the table. On the counter, where she was ignoring it, was an envelope with three uncashed checks that Winnie had sent him, the last of the funds Jerry had meant for the restaurant. Avery pretended that her disapproval didn’t bother him, and all in all, what did it matter, anyway. He was Zen, he was letting go, he was moving on; they both were.

The Blue Apple was now a diner again. Avery had sublet to a guy named Rashid who ran two other identical outfits in Brooklyn—one just under the Brooklyn Bridge and one in Carroll Gardens. They were each called Deli to Go, and when Avery watched that sign being nailed above the door, he thought about arguing the point—there was nothing deli about hamburgers and french fries—but didn’t.

So what if when he told her about giving up on the Blue Apple, Winnie first argued and eventually just shook her head? So what if Rashid’s egg sandwiches were rubbery and tasted like old grease? So what if no one back home—not his mother, not Rich, none of his no-longer friends that he wouldn’t be calling, anyway—knew how close he had come to running his own restaurant? Out there, Jerry was the only one who cared, who knew, and by now he’d forgotten it all.

Avery stared at the kitchen table, now full of food. Somehow he had sliced the rolls and the tenderloins, topped the sandwiches with the apples, and plated the salads.

“I wish you hadn’t gone to the trouble,” Winnie said, at his shoulder. “Look at all this food.”

“Trouble’s my middle name. Ready to eat?”

They sat facing each other, neither hungry, each pretending to be interested in a huge pork sandwich on a hot summer day.

“Do you want me to, you know—call you with updates? About him?”

Winnie took a sip of water. She made a motion with her head, somewhere between a nod and a shake.

“Or I could put you guys on speakerphone. And leave the room, I mean. If you wanted.”

Avery didn’t know why she wasn’t responding to any of this. He thought it was a nice idea.

“It’s not about what I want anymore,” Winnie said. “This is about your mother. And you,” she said, although it seemed like an afterthought.

“But—you’re going to come out for the—” He stopped himself, just in time. And took a big bite of his sandwich, to cover the word funeral.

“I don’t know if I will or not,” Winnie said evenly. “I don’t think I’d be such a welcome presence. And anyway…”

“Okay.”

“I don’t expect you to understand. You’re a young person, and—” She put her hand on the crook of Avery’s arm. “Never mind. I hate to hear myself start to explain what it’s really like to be old, as if I’m some sage elder, dispensing wisdom to all the grateful youngsters.”

“That’s me: grateful youngster.”

“I’m not afraid of it, by the way,” Winnie said. She looked more cheerful now, though she still wasn’t eating. “Death. That’s one thing I will say, one thing I wish my own grandparents had told me. The closer you get to it, the more natural it seems.”

“Uh—okay. That’s good, I guess?”

“I had a dream once, about dying. I dreamed I was burrowing into the warm dirt, like some kind of animal who lives underground. And my eyes were shut, and I was pushing deeper and deeper into the earth, wiggling myself into a place that was comfortable. It got darker and darker, and I knew that when I stopped, once I was wedged into the most comfortable position I could be in, everything would just…stop.”

Avery put down his fork. “That’s—kind of messed up.”

“It was reassuring. I took it to mean that death was like sleep—which makes sense, of course. Anyway, I can’t explain it, but it was natural; it seemed like the most natural thing you could do.”

“Did you ever tell Grandad about that? What did he say?”

“No, I never did. I had that dream long before I met him. And it just never came up.” Winnie smiled to herself. “We had other things to discuss.”

Avery had other questions, but he kept them to himself. Did she think that Jerry’s death would be like that, the warm earth, the falling asleep? Had she been afraid to watch him die? Is that why she gave him up to Annette? (He guessed this is what his mother thought—Winnie couldn’t hack it, when the chips were down—but Avery knew enough about his mother to know that she had to think this way, because feeling grateful wasn’t in her nature.) Or maybe it was just easier to contemplate your own death—more polite, in a way—than your failing husband’s?

“What does Rachel think?” He took a mouthful of pork—a little on the dry side, but it couldn’t be helped. No one sold fatty pork anymore.

“About—this? I don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell her about that dream? How come?”

“Well, I guess it never came up. Rachel’s hardly one to think deeply about these things. She’d laugh it off, most likely. Say I was being morbid.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, who thought that thinking or dreaming about death was the definition of morbid. “You guys aren’t that close anyway, right?”

“What do you mean?” Winnie said. “We’re closer than close! We live in the same one-square-mile town, don’t we?”

“Well, yeah, but…never mind. It’s cool.” Now he wolfed down another half of the sandwich, wishing he had just stuck to the weather.

“Avery. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing! I don’t know! I just said it. Forget it. It’s just that—you know, the way everything got so weird with my mom, when you and Grandad got married…it just seemed like maybe that’s what happened with you and Rachel, too. Or not.” Christ. “Don’t listen to me.”

“That was completely different, your mother and—” Winnie twisted her napkin around and around a finger. “Rachel has gone through an incredible, difficult time, with Bob’s accident and having to raise her daughters. She works hard, she has to manage a thousand things—”

“Sure, sure.”

“And we talk all the time! We talk four times a day! She’s probably on her way over here as we speak. Really, Avery,” Winnie said, pushing her plate an inch away from her. “You’re mistaken.”

“Got it.” It figured that without Nona around, every relationship would turn sour. It felt like trying to play the piano with oven mitts on. He’d rarely seen Winnie look this displeased, this upset. “So, listen to this. The other night I went out to a bar.” A funny story. That’s what they needed.

“What? You shouldn’t be doing that.”

“True, but a bar is the only place where this game is played. Trust me. Anyway, I figure, with my girlfriend run out on me”—he said this as quickly as possible, as if it were a necessary part of the joke setup—“I better get back in the action quick, before I lose practice. Anyway, I sat there, drinking flat ginger ale, on a Tuesday night, checking out all the girls.” Winnie looked nonplussed—and why on earth had he started this story, which, Avery quickly realized, was as depressing in the telling as it had been in the bar.

“Um—there was baseball on, spring try-outs, so I’m watching something about the Mets. Anyway. Then this girl sat next to me, and we start talking.” She had been everything Nona was not: tall, thin, young, blonde. Simple. About as interesting as the pre-season Mets.

“So, I’m working it, just a little—I’ve got moves, Winnie, don’t doubt it.” This was forced, but at least she gave a wan smile. “But just as things get going, I realized I’ve forgotten her name, or maybe I never even knew it in the first place—obviously it’s a little late to ask because we’ve been hanging out for over an hour and…”

Avery stopped. He laced his fingers and put his hands on top of his head. This stupid story was making him sweat; he could see himself there, in all his misery, in that place on West Broadway. Why did it feel so disgusting? To make yourself go through with something when you knew your heart isn’t into it. After a while, the no-name girl had put her palm on the inner part of his thigh, she had whispered something nasty in his ear, and then taken herself off to the bathroom in the back where, Avery understood, he was supposed to join her and lick a stripe of cocaine off her ass before all the usual bodily proceedings commenced. He’d paid for his two sodas and her many Jack-and-Cokes, and left the bar.

Winnie was looking at her hands; she didn’t press him to finish the story, which was a relief. The food lay forgotten on the plates beside them.

“I keep promising myself I won’t ask you something,” she said. “Those times you and he met, in the office. Did he speak very much about…your grandmother?”

“About my—?” A faded mental image of his grandmother, harmless and soft and old. What did she have to do with anything?

“Beth Ann. Did he talk much about her? All those years he had with her.”

Avery realized it then, in the sound of that name and the way it was spoken (Beth Ann—he’d hardly remembered that had been his grandmother’s name), what was making Winnie so shy and ashamed. He forced his voice to sound hearty and authoritative.

“Nope. Never, really. Just in passing, I guess. Actually, who he mostly went on about was his brother, Frank.”

Winnie flashed a little smile, grateful. She wouldn’t push him, he knew, but it was the truth, anyway.

“You’re being a fool,” she said next.

“What?”

“You, Nona. This is not the same thing,” she said. “These are not the same situation, yours and mine.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“All this bearing up, all your brave let’s-put-a-good-face-on-it. What are you thinking? Isn’t that what they say, nowadays? Why are you so dense?” Winnie’s voice had some real heat in it, and Avery was taken aback. In fact, he was pretty proud of his putting a good face on it. He felt like crap, he was lonely and sadder than he’d ever known it was possible to be, and yet here he was, out in the suburbs to cook lunch for some old lady you could argue he wasn’t even related to. Why was he getting all this shit, then?

“You don’t get it. She’s away at this place, for a whole year.”

“A whole year?” Winnie echoed, mimicking him in an unpleasant way. “So? Is it a nunnery? Is she kept under lock and key?”

“So, she’s working on her singing, it’s this really big deal…” Avery trailed off. It was exhausting, even saying this out loud, something so obvious it sounded fake and unsure.

“Did she tell you not to go there? Not to try?”

“It’s not allowed—they don’t let—”

“It’s not allowed?” Winnie said, and Avery caught the faint glimmer of a laugh in her voice. “Are you now a person who has to be allowed to do something he wants to do?”

Man. It’s not like he could explain it to her, the way Nona’s face had looked—careful, uncertain—that one time he’d tried to make a real case for going with her. And you would have thought Winnie, as cool as she was, would be more clued in. It was a disappointment, this whole line from her, the way she was acting like there was some big romantic rescue in the works for him. Swoop into Rome and just…what? Announce to Nona that what they had was different and better than either of them were admitting? Life wasn’t like that—Winnie of all people should know, right? You had to be—yes, as lame as it sounded—a grown-up about things. Love ended. Or it didn’t, but you had to suck it up, stagger through, do your thing even when you were a broken person inside.

He was about to respond—it’s more complicated than that, you don’t understand, it’s not like I could just—when the door in the hall outside the kitchen opened and closed. Soon Rachel was there, loud and energetic and tripping over a chair. Bags were spilled; curses were let loose. She didn’t act surprised to see Avery there in Winnie’s kitchen, nor the two of them sitting quietly and close, all mournful and down. She fixed her attention, instead, on the lunch leftovers.

“Good God,” Rachel said, picking up half of Winnie’s sandwich and biting into it. “Is this like a Cuban or something? I’m so hungry I’m about to pass out.”