“All right, then. I’ll catch her later.” Anthony gestured toward the flowers on the counter. “You should probably put those in water.” He’d almost said we but he caught himself. Seemed too familiar, too presumptuous.

“I’m on it,” said Maggie authoritatively. She hopped down from the counter and scooped up the bouquet.

“I think there’s a little packet of flower food tucked inside there.” Early in their marriage Anthony had brought Cassie a fresh bouquet of roses every Friday evening; he knew his way around the care and feeding of flowers. He’d stopped once Cassie started sleeping with Glen Manning. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Cassie had started sleeping with Glen Manning because Anthony had stopped bringing her roses.

But Maggie was way ahead of him. She was already cutting open the packet and dissolving it in a vase full of water. “Got it,” she said.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Bye, Maggie. Bye, Pickles.”

The former writer reluctantly left the house. And the lovely child with the purple streak in her hair turned the music back up and didn’t give him a second look.

As he was un-leaning his bike from the gate that separated Joy’s tiny yard from her neighbor’s, his phone rang. He thought, Joy! He answered without looking. But it was his mother.

“You never called me back, Anthony. I thought we were going to talk.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. What did you want to talk about?” He stuck his phone between his shoulder and ear and began to walk his bike.

“Your father started his book tour,” Dorothy said. “He’s in Madison, Connecticut. RJ Julia.” When Anthony was young, some of his favorite times were when his father was on book tour, and it was just the two of them in the house, him and his mother. They ate grilled cheese for dinner and played endless games of Spit and Crazy Eights. The very house seemed to breathe more easily, freed from the confines of Leonard’s needs, Leonard’s schedule, Leonard’s heavy footsteps.

Through the window he could see Maggie dancing and lip-syncing. If he really strained, he could hear the music too—the soundtrack was playing in order, “Schuyler Defeated” now. An island girl, wise and funny, with an open heart and a purple streak in her hair.

“Mom?” Anthony asked. “Did you have something specific you wanted to talk about?” He wouldn’t be able to ride a bike and talk on the phone at the same time. But if he told his mother he was about to get on a bike, it would sound like he was on vacation, not in exile, on his own personal Elba.

“I do,” she said. “I do have something specific. But it’s not a quick thing. If you don’t have time now . . . another time.”

“Okay,” he said. “Another time. Are you sure, Mom?”

“Another time,” she repeated. “Soon.”

Chapter 20

LU

LU READ THE email that had come through on her blogging service twice before she let herself believe it was true. A literary agent named Abigail Knowles, who worked at an agency in Manhattan called WLA, wanted to talk to Dinner by Dad about putting together a cookbook proposal to shop around to publishers.