“Hamburger Helper and lima beans and—”

“You told me you could cook.”

“But I did.” She’d waved at the frying pan.

Andrew had tossed down his napkin and left the table, casino bound.

So she’d bought a Betty Crocker cookbook the next day and started to work.

In the afternoons in their tract house, young Jacob would watch her feverishly fricasseeing a chicken or pan-sautéing cod. She fought the food, she wrestled. She didn’t learn first principles and rules (it’s all about chemistry and physics, after all). Instead she attacked each recipe as if she’d never seen a steak or a piece of flounder or pile of cool flour. Her sauces were lumpy and bizarrely seasoned and always oversalted—though not to Andrew, so perhaps they weren’t over, at all.

Unlike her son, Marianne stressed mightily before and during the preparation of each meal and invariably had more than one glass of wine. A bit of whiskey too. Or whatever was in the cabinet.

But she worked hard and managed to produce meals functional enough to hold Andrew’s presence for an hour or so. Inevitably, though, with a clink of dessert fork on china, a last gulp of coffee—Andrew didn’t sip—he would rise and vanish. To the basement to work on his secret business projects, to a local bar, back to the casino. To fuck a neighbor, Jacob speculated, when he learned about fucking.

After school or weekends, if he wasn’t slamming his wrestling match opponents into the mat or competing on the rifle team at school, Jacob would hang out in the kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, sitting near his mother as she laid waste the kitchen, with dribbles of milk and tomato sauce everywhere, shrapnel of poppy seeds, the detritus of herbs, flour, cornstarch, viscera. The spatter of blood too.

Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed and ask him to help by removing gristle and boning meat and slicing scaloppine. Marianne seemed to think that a boy would be more inclined to use a knife than an egg beater.

“Look at that, honey. Good job. You’re my little butcher man!”

He found himself taking over more and more and instinctively repairing the stew, chopping more finely, offing the heat at the right moment before a disastrous boil. His mother patted his cheek and poured more wine.

Now Swann looked at the woman strapped to his chair.

He continued to be angry that she’d ruined his plans that afternoon.

She continued to cry.