The Corrections

purchases.”
    “Dad!”
    “That’s my decision, it’s final.”
    “Caleb, it doesn’t matter, though,” Caroline said. “Gary, it doesn’t matter, because he’s got his own money. He can spend it however he wants. Right, Caleb?”
    Out of Gary’s sight, below the level of the table, she gave Caleb some kind of hand signal.
    “Right, I’ve got my own savings!” Caleb’s tone again ironic or enthusiastic or, somehow, both.
    “You and I will talk about this later, Caro,” Gary said. Warmth and perversion and stupidity, all deriving from the gin, were descending from behind his ears and down his arms and torso.
    Jonah came back inside smelling like mesquite.
    Caroline had opened a second large bag of potato chips.
    “Don’t spoil your appetite, guys,” Gary said in a strained voice, taking food from plastic compartments.
    Again mother and son traded glances.
    “Yeah, right,” Caleb said. “Gotta save room for mixed grill!”
    Gary energetically sliced meats and skewered vegetables. Jonah set the table, spacing the flatware with the precision that he liked. The rain had stopped, but the deck was still slippery when Gary went outside.
    It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu. To Gary there was indeed something endlessly delicious, something irresistibly luxurious , about a bit of lamb, a bit of pork, a bit of veal, and a lean and tender modern-style sausage or two—a classic mixed grill, in short. It was such a treat that he began to do his own mixed grills at home. Along with pizza and Chinese takeout and one-pot pasta meals, mixed grill became a family staple. Caroline helped out by bringing home multiple heavy blood-damp bags of meat and sausage every Saturday, and before long Gary was doing mixed grill two or even three times a week, braving all but the foulest weather on the deck, and loving it. He did partridge breasts, chicken livers, filets mignons, and Mexican-flavored turkey sausage. He did zucchini and red peppers. He did eggplant, yellow peppers, baby lamb chops, Italian sausage. He came up with a wonderful bratwurst—rib eye–bok choy combo. He loved it and loved it and loved it and then all at once he didn’t.
    The clinical term, anhedonia, had introduced itself to him in a nightstand book of Caroline’s called Feeling GREAT! (Ashley Tralpis, M.D., Ph.D.). He’d read the dictionary entry for anhedonia with a shiver of recognition, a kind of malignant yes, yes : “a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts.” anhedonia was more than a Warning Sign, it was an out-and-out symptom. A dry rot spreading from pleasure to pleasure, a fungus spoiling the delightin luxury and joy in leisure which for so many years had fueled Gary’s resistance to the poorthink of his parents.
    The previous March, in St. Jude, Enid had observed that, for a bank vice president married to a woman who worked only part-time, pro bono, for the Children’s Defense Fund, Gary seemed to do an awful lot of cooking. Gary had shut his mother up easily enough; she was married to a man who couldn’t boil an egg, and obviously she was jealous. But on Gary’s birthday, after he’d flown back from St. Jude with Jonah and received the expensive surprise of a color photo lab, after he’d mustered the will to exclaim, A darkroom , fantastic, I love it, I love it , Caroline handed him a platter of raw prawns and brutal swordfish steaks to grill, and he wondered if his mother had a point. On the deck, in the radiant heat, as he blackened the prawns and seared the swordfish, a weariness overtook him. The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition. On the inner walls of the grill a deep-pile carpet of phenolic black greases had accumulated. The ground behind the garage where he dumped the ashes resembled a moonscape or the yard of a cement plant. He was very, very, very sick of mixed grill, and the next morning he told Caroline: “I’m doing too much cooking.”
    “So do less,” she said. “We’ll eat