The Corrections

out.”
    “I want to eat at home and I want to do less cooking.”
    “So order in,” she said.
    “It’s not the same.”
    “You’re the one who’s bent on having these sit-down dinners. The boys couldn’t care less.”
    “ I care about it. It’s important to me .”
    “Fine, but, Gary: it’s not important to me, it’s not important to the boys, and we’re supposed to cook for you?”
    He couldn’t entirely blame Caroline. In the years when she’d worked full-time, he’d never complained about frozen or takeout or pre-prepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing—that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t valued the way they were when he was young.
    And so here he was, still grilling. Through the kitchen windows he could see Caroline thumb-wrestling Jonah. He could see her taking Aaron’s headphones to listen to music, could see her nodding to the beat. It sure looked like family life. Was there really anything amiss here but the clinical depression of the man peering in?
    Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork, and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grave concern.
    “Doesn’t anyone else want to know how Prince Caspian ends?” Jonah said. “Isn’t anyone curious at all?”
    Caroline’s eyelids were fluttering, her mouth hanging open miserably to let air trickle in and out. Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk.
    “Jesus, Caroline,” he said, “we know your back hurts, we know you’re miserable, but if you can’t even sit up straight at the table—”
    Without a word she slid off her chair, hobbled to the sink with her plate, scraped her dinner into the garbage grinder, and hobbled upstairs. Caleb and Aaron excused themselves and ground up their own dinners and followed her. Altogether maybe thirty dollars’ worth of meat went into thesewer, but Gary, trying to keep his Factor 3 levels off the floor, succeeded pretty well in forgetting about the animals that had died for this purpose. He sat in the leaden twilight of his buzz, ate without tasting, and listened to Jonah’s impervious bright chatter.
    “This is an excellent skirt steak, Dad, and I would love another piece of that grilled zucchini, please.”
    From the entertainment room upstairs came the woofing of prime time. Gary felt briefly sorry for Aaron and Caleb. It was a burden to have a mother need you so extremely, to be responsible for her bliss, Gary knew this. He also understood that Caroline was more alone in the world than he was. Her father had been a handsome, charismatic anthropologist who died in a plane crash in Mali when she was eleven. Her father’s parents, old Quakers who intermittently said “thee,” had left her half of their estate, including a well-regarded Andrew Wyeth, three Winslow Homer watercolors, and forty sylvan acres near Kennett Square for which a developer had paid an incredible sum. Caroline’s mother, now seventy-six and in scarily good health, lived with her second husband in Laguna Beach and was a major benefactor of the California Democratic Party; she came east every April and bragged about not being “one of those old women” who were obsessed with their grandkids. Caroline’s only sibling, a brother named Philip, was a patronizing, pocket-protected bachelor and solid-state physicist on whom her mother doted somewhat creepily. Gary hadn’t known this kind of family in St. Jude. From the start, he’d loved and pitied Caroline for the misfortune and neglect she’d suffered growing up. He’d undertaken to provide a better family for her.
    But after dinner, while he and Jonah were loading the dishwasher, he began to hear female laughter upstairs, actual loud laughter, and he decided that Caroline was doing something very bad to him. He was tempted to go up and crash the party. As the buzzing of the gin faded from hishead, however, the clanging of an earlier anxiety was becoming audible. An Axon-related anxiety.
    He wondered why a small company with a highly experimental process was bothering to offer his father money.
    That the letter to Alfred had come from Bragg