Five Days in Summer

the cost of doing business.” She heard his laugh and saw his handsome winking face and felt his confidence, his ability to bound forward. They had always landed on their feet.
    “I know, Will, leap don’t creep.” She unloaded the bag of ice cream into a shaded area of the trunk.
    “Stop worrying. Anyway we won’t be fully committed until we have to sign a contract. By then we’ll be sure.”
    “You know what?” Toilet paper and snacks. Milk and cold cuts. Magic cups. “I am sure. It’s going to work out, I feel it.” She knew how much he wanted that gorgeous house in Brooklyn Heights, with its wide rooms, fanciful turn-of-the-last-century details, space for everyone, and views of the East River curling around the southern tip of Manhattan.
    “Upward and onward,” he said. “Where are you?”
    “In the parking lot at the grocery store. It’s hot out here.”
    “Get home, sweetie. Kiss the kids. I’ve got to makesome calls before the dinner rush. The new manager still can’t really handle it without me.”
    “What’s on special tonight?” she asked as she always did, in the tone of the knock-knock jokes the boys told incessantly.
    “If it’s Monday—”
    “It’s fish.”
    They laughed and she slammed shut the trunk.
    “All right, honey,” she said, “I’ve got to get back to the house. Talk later.”
    He sent her a kiss through the phone, which meant he was uncharacteristically alone somewhere in the restaurant. Even if the Madison Square Café didn’t hire him as its new executive director, she knew he’d still be happy in the busy swirl at Rolf’s, just disappointed; it would mean, of course, turning away from the house.
    She ended the call and dropped the phone back into her purse. A shadow passed over her and she looked up to the sky, expecting to see the clouds back in force. But just as her mind registered blue, an acrid cloth slammed over her face and she was overcome by darkness.

Chapter 2
    The sweet smell of onions frying near midnight reminded Will of his bachelor days, when meals naturally fell out of sync and you never knew what came next. Back then he ate most of his meals at whichever restaurant he was working; as a striving actor free meals and untaxed tips had baited him to the work of survival. Now, his hankering for the stage dulled by years on a wheel that had spun him nowhere, he understood the value of a good job with benefits and a future, and the succor of a meal in the quiet of his own home. Cooking here, in the family kitchen, was nurture, not art; what he demanded of his chefs he forgave in himself. He loved the sanctuary of cooking. And though he missed Emily and the kids during their long summer holidays, and joined them as often as the restaurant could release him for two days or more, there was nothing like the tranquility of an empty kitchen and the sizzle of onions as they cleared then began to brown. Jeans, cooking, music; he could stay young forever this way. Tonight it was Louis Arm-strong and Jack Teagarden melding their gritty voices in “Rockin’ Chair.”
    As he chopped the vegetables, the cooking and the music and even the cold kitchen tiles on his bare feettriggered a feeling he couldn’t decipher. It had been that way as long as he could remember: sensations, sounds, smells almost connecting, but never quite, with a life that preceded memory. It was like an endless loop with a blank spot; and the blank spot was a single day, thirty-six years ago. He had lost his parents to a car crash just at the moment in his childhood when he might have known them beyond a flash of expression, a word swelled in volume, a scent resonating something exquisite sealed inside him. He was just four when they died; his sister, Caroline, was nine. Some days were volleys of déjà vu, thoughts that never crystallized and ultimately had the effect of an itch he couldn’t reach. He had learned that if he stayed busy enough, most of the tempting sensations would pass over him unnoticed. He was left with an impression of floating. As a young man he had floated into Emily’s arms and she had anchored him. As a father and husband he had come to appreciate more about his capacities than he had previously understood. Most of all, he learned that whatever his parents had given him, it must have been enough.
    Will and Emily had lived together in this old two-bedroom apartment for sixteen years, before marriage, before children. They’d outgrown it years ago but only