But hey, there’s plenty of time for that. She’s still there, my cute wife, whom I love: humming and singing to herself when there is tension in the house; or laughing, when all the doors are open, talking to her sister on the phone in the living room while I finish my dinner. We’re going to be happy more than not, Linda and me. We’re going to get this thing right. Even when it backfires, you don’t necessarily hate someone for very long.

THERE SHOULD BE A NAME FOR IT

LYNN’S ROASTING A chicken. She takes out garlic, chili powder, and a lime. “What’s that for?” I say. “There are pine nuts above your head,” she says. I hand them down to her. Now she butters the pan. She’s got the coriander in a bag, cloves, curry, and two oranges. Then other green herbs. Jesus Christ, I’m thinking, all that crap for the chicken.

“All that’s for the chicken?”

“What?”

“What? That.” I’m pulling on my eyebrow hair. It’s a nervous habit, but I feel like plucking these long curly ones. “All that goes on the chicken?”

She rinses off her hands and says, “This is a recipe from my mom.”

It’s early summer. It’s afternoon, and the kitchen is the brightest room in this house. It’s like a greenhouse in here, very sunny. The house itself is small and cheap, though a hundred and fifty years ago somebody planted a sycamore on the front lawn. Protected from the wind and fed by sun and water, the plant grew into a giant. The limbs stretch up—it’s like an elephant, white tusks against the sky.

“Up we go,” she says, upending the chicken. She pulls a wax-paper bag from inside it like an envelope and drops it in the sink.

“What the hell is that?” I say. Lynn wipes her forehead with her wrist. She takes the bag out of the sink and tears it open, spilling the contents into her hand. It’s meat—it looks like tongues.

“Oh, my God.”

“It’s chicken livers. See?”

She flicks them with her finger. It’s three glistening pieces of purple meat, but not at all like steak. They look like they were alive five minutes ago. She holds one. She seems to enjoy touching it.

“O.K., get rid of it.” Lynn puts the bag and the livers in the garbage. She says, “You make it with onions. My mother loves it.”

“Yeah.”

This is the whole chicken, an entire animal. Like, I haven’t exactly seen this done before by a person my age. We’re both kids. We don’t know how to cook this stuff. In all the time we’ve been living together, Lynn’s never cooked a whole chicken.