“Did you get the gluten?” my father calls through the doorway.

“There’s no gluten in this whole town,” I say. “Not even in that specialty store in the mall.”

“Those bastards,” he says. “Would it kill them to put a little gluten on the shelf?”

At some point during the afternoon, I see, he’s pulled out all his cooking supplies from the cabinets—his pans and bowls and his flour and sugar, the little sleeves of yeast and the jumbo bag of raisins. But he won’t do anything with them now except make the point that he can’t do anything with them because I didn’t buy the gluten, so now the kitchen’s cluttered and waiting for me to clean it. I leave everything right where it is, and it’s still there in the early evening when I drop some pasta into a pot on the stove.

We eat on trays in front of the TV in the living room. We watch Antiques Roadshow. After only a few bites he sits back from his tray, breathing heavily, and says, “I might just go to bed.”

“You want your oxygen?”

“Did that sound like ‘I want my oxygen’? I’m tired. Hand me that.” He’s motioning toward the ashtray on the coffee table in front of our trays. I lean over and get it for him, and he sets it on the cushion between us and digs his cigarettes out of a pocket in his robe. He’s got a Winston lit before he notices I’m watching him. “I’m still under half a pack a day, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You don’t have to. I’m waiting for them to pass a law that says a man can’t smoke in his own living room. That day will come, believe me. Kids will be carrying dope to school in their lunch boxes, and cigarettes will be a federal crime. I’m Nostradamus when it comes to that one.”

He stares at me, pulls on the cigarette, and exhales a storm of smoke.

“Your mother—the big anti-smoking radical?” he says, which I take to mean only that my mother doesn’t smoke. “I’ll let you in on a little family secret. When we were first married and living in the hotel, while she was pregnant with you? She was known to ‘court the evil weed’ herself.” He’s nodding his head like we’ve been arguing about my mother’s virtue. “Late at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she would sneak cigarettes. I caught her.”

I don’t know what he’s eaten today, and I know he’s supposed to eat lots of little meals to even out his blood-sugar level, even though he’s overweight, so I say, “You don’t like the spaghetti?”

“It’s okay,” he says.