He returned to preparing his three-course dinner for tonight. The starter would be asparagus steamed in a water-vermouth mixture, infused with a fresh bay leaf and a pinch of sage. The spears would rest on a bed of mâche and be dotted with homemade hollandaise sauce—that verb being key, “dotted,” since anytime yolk meets butter, you can easily overdo. The trick about asparagus, of course, is timing. The Romans had a cliché—doing something in the duration it took to cook asparagus meant doing it quickly.

Swann sipped the wine and prepared the steamer liquid. He then trimmed the herbs from his window box.

When his mother left them—wine plus eighty-two mph without a seat belt—sixteen-year-old Jacob took over the cooking.

Just the two of them, dad and son.

The teenager did the same as his mother, corralling Andrew with meals, the only differences being that the boy enjoyed the act of cooking and was far better than his mother. He took to serving serial courses—like a chef’s tasting menu—to stretch out the time the men could be together. One other difference emerged eventually: He found he liked the cooking better than the hour or so spent consuming the meal; he realized he didn’t really like his father very much. The man didn’t want to talk about the things that Jacob did: video games, kickboxing, wrestling, hunting, guns in general and bare-knuckle boxing. Andrew didn’t want to talk about much at all except Andrew.

Once, when Jacob was eighteen, his father returned home with a beautiful, a really beautiful blonde. He had told the woman what a good cook “my kid is.” Like he was showing off a tacky pinkie ring. He’d said to Jacob, “Make Cindi here something nice, okay? Make something nice for the pretty lady.”

Jacob was well aware of E. coli by then. Yet as much as he wanted to see twenty-four-year-old Cindi retch to death, or at least retch, he couldn’t bring himself to intentionally ruin a dish. He received raves from the woman for his chicken Cordon Bleu, which he made not by pounding the poultry breast flat but by slicing the meat into thin sheets to enwrap the Gruyère cheese and—in his recipe—prosciutto ham from Parma.

Butcher man…