Shy stuck her tongue into the hole at the top of the tiny bottle and puckered her lips. “Wine is better.”

Wendy took it away from her. “This restaurant is getting an F rating.” She poured a bunch of vanilla into the bowl of butter and brown sugar without measuring it.

“Dad, do you want me to put nuts in some of them? I think we have pecans,” Shy called out.

There was no answer from the library.

“Don’t bother him. I think he’s writing—like, actually writing. It’s been a while since he’s been this productive.”

Wendy had just returned from her own chair in the library where, instead of getting up the courage to tell Roy she’d been fired from Fleurt and was now filling in for someone on maternity leave at Enjoy!, a lifestyle magazine full of beautiful bathtubs and decadent desserts, she’d attempted to paraphrase a Malcolm Gladwell piece from The New Yorker that questioned the whole movement to legalize marijuana. Wendy hated pot—the odor, how slow everyone got when they smoked it, the need to eat afterward.

“Finally, someone with some sense,” she’d said to Roy’s profile as he stared fixedly at the blank screen of his laptop. “Not nearly enough research has been done. There haven’t been enough studies. It’s simply a disaster waiting to happen. How will planes and trains run on time? How will UPS deliver anything to the right location if everyone is high? It causes impotence, too.”

Roy did not respond.

A disaster waiting to happen, he repeated silently, still staring at his screen. Impotence. He hit return.

Wendy left him alone.

Shy stuck both hands into the bowl and squeezed the raw egg yolks until they popped and oozed between her fingers. She preferred not to use an electric mixer or utensils of any kind.

“Mr. Streko got a new tattoo,” she told her mother as she churned and kneaded the bowl of sweet goo. “On his neck.”

He already had so many tattoos, half of which she hadn’t seen. There were some on his back—he’d told the class—and some on his legs. Monday he’d come to school with a bandage on his neck and a few days later had revealed an orange-and-blue baseball with legs and a toothy face. He said he’d made a bet with a friend at a baseball game in college. “If the Mets don’t win the World Series in the next ten years, I’ll get an ugly tattoo that everyone can see.” It was pretty crazy of him. Shy hated it, but she also sort of loved it. Mr. Streko’s skin was very tan and his body was so covered in black hair that his tattoos were like faint background patterns that you didn’t notice until you stared really hard at them.