Lu knocked on Anthony’s door. “I made way too much summer vegetable lasagna,” she said without preamble, when he opened it. “And Jeremy is doing a double shift. Could you find it in your heart to help me? Tonight?” It wasn’t like she could have made less lasagna—a lasagna pan was a standard size. But the boys didn’t like all the summer vegetables (Chase eschewed mushrooms in all forms, and Sebastian harbored a grievance against eggplant) and Lu loved this dish; she hated to see it go to waste. She would roast a pan of broccoli too, since the boys would eat that and she could throw the leftovers into a salad the next day. “Unless you have plans with Joy,” she added hastily. “But I thought Maggie said that she and Joy had something to do tonight—”
“They do,” he said. “Dinner with friends. I’ll see Joy later, and in the meantime I’d love to have dinner with you and the boys.”
It made Lu feel useful to have another adult to cook for. Her mind had actually formed the phrase to have a man to cook for, but she knew how politically incorrect that was, so she pushed it right back into the recesses of her brain. Was there a name for that, the part of the brain where you put inappropriate thoughts? Jeremy might know.
It wasn’t only about the lasagna, though. Now that she knew that Anthony wasn’t just her summer neighbor who was dating the mother of her mother’s helper but that he was in hiding and that his father was the one and only Leonard Puckett, she wanted to know more about him. She was intrigued!
When Anthony showed up two hours later, he was carrying a small bouquet of wildflowers—a lovely touch. Lu put them in water and cut up the lasagna. She served the boys at the kitchen island, and she and Anthony sat at the little table in the kitchen. Chase had found a chopstick and was using it to pick out all the mushroom pieces.
“So,” Lu said, once they were settled. “I have so many things I want to ask you, now that I know who you are.” She still couldn’t quite believe it. She had read A Room Within when it had come out, after that fabulous review in the Times. Everybody had read that book when it came out! “For one thing, are you close with your father?”
Anthony started. “Not really—not anymore.”
“Not since you brought shame upon the family name? Chase, put that down.” Chase was holding the chopstick alarmingly close to his brother’s nostril. Lu caught the look on Anthony’s face and said, “I’m sorry.” She had overstepped. It was a bad habit of hers, assuming a familiarity with a new friend that she hadn’t yet earned.
“No, that’s okay. It’s not that. It’s more that—well, it happened before I brought shame on the family name. When I was a kid, we were close. But when I was in college we sort of lost that. It was like, my whole life, my dad was this icon, you know. A star! In the book world, anyway. And in our house, for sure. I revered him.”
Lu nodded and speared a piece of broccoli. She’d finally gotten the hang of this oven, and of the too-shiny rimmed baking sheet. (So many times she wished she’d brought her own from home; she’d written a whole post once on the joys of roasting vegetables on a stained, blackened sheet.) But this time she’d nailed it; the broccoli was lightly charred on the outside and still tender when you bit into it. Little bit of sea salt. Just the way she liked it: it was better than popcorn.
“A lot of people feel that way about their parents.” He sighed heavily. “And then at some point, he became human. I guess when I became a writer myself. Then, after what happened earlier this year—I mean, what I did, not what happened—he didn’t want to talk to me at all. He must be so ashamed.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s my own fault.”
“But I’m still sorry. At the same time, I can imagine it being hard on him. He’s so big-time. I’ve been reading your dad’s books . . . forever! In college . . . man. I used to avoid studying so I could read them. They were like crack.”
“It wasn’t like being Mick Jagger’s son, but it was still a big deal. He sells a lot of books. He makes a lot of money. He has a lot of fans. He was interviewed by Travis Weaver earlier this summer!”
“I know,” said Lu. “I actually saw that.” She thought Travis Weaver was a little pompous, but she watched him anyway because she liked his hair and sometimes they did a decent cooking segment. The day Leonard Puckett was on she’d learned a new trick to try with gazpacho: soak the bread before adding it to the blender. “He was great! So charming. It’s so funny that I didn’t know then that that was your father.”
“Can I be done?” asked Sebastian and Chase at the same time. They must have planned it ahead of time.
“You two can skedaddle,” Lu told them. “Just put your plates in the sink first.” They’d done a passable job on the broccoli but had made a poor showing with the lasagna, as expected. Charlie and Sammy were much more reliable vegetable eaters. “I always wanted to be a writer,” she continued, turning her attention back to Anthony. “I guess that’s why I—”
(She almost said it. Out loud.)
“Why you what?” He seemed genuinely curious, which Lu appreciated.
“Why I liked law school so much,” she recovered. “There was lots of writing. Everybody else got tired of it, but I never did.” That was true. “In college, I was an English major. I was crazy for Virginia Woolf. Money and a room of one’s own, and all of that.”
He nodded approvingly. “Good choice,” he said. “From one English major to another.”
“My senior year my housemates and I adopted a cat and I named her Lily Briscoe.”
“I love it. Lily Briscoe the cat.” He laughed sincerely.
His laughter felt like an achievement to Lu. She didn’t feel like she’d made Jeremy laugh at all lately, either because he hadn’t been here or when he was she was too busy covering her tracks to indulge in humor. And they used to laugh so much! All the time, laughing until they got stitches, laughing until the cows came home. Even during sex, they used to laugh.
Chase’s and Sebastian’s plates rattled as they went into the sink—Lu knew she was walking that fine line between teaching them table-clearing manners and risking broken dishes she’d have to replace. They were very excited because Maggie had seen a notice for an event at the Island Free Library. The library was having an exotic-animals person in, which was exactly up Chase’s alley. Lu imagined the exotic-animals person might bring a lizard or an iguana; perhaps, if they were lucky, a chinchilla or a nonthreatening but impressively long snake the children could take turns wearing on their necks. She knew, of course, that Chase, having glimpsed the poster downtown, was hoping for a wallaroo or a Siberian tiger.
Once the boys had disappeared into the living room and turned on the television, Lu asked, “So, really, what was it like? Being the son of someone like that?” Jeremy would have disapproved of television time immediately after dinner. He wanted them to play wholesome board games, but he was never here to play them.
Anthony moved the last bit of broccoli around his plate. It was extra-charred, and if Lu had known him better she might have asked him if she could have it. “It was all I knew,” he said. He squinted at his plate. “I don’t really have a point of comparison, you know? I mean, I guess what I would mostly say is that our worlds revolved around him, my mother’s and mine. We traveled where he needed to go, we stayed quiet when he needed to work, we ate dinner at the same time every night because he worked best when everything around him was really controlled. He was like a god to me, you know? And then . . . I don’t know. I showed him my first story, and everything changed.”
“Probably he was jealous.” To Lu that seemed obvious. When she’d first read A Room Within she’d been blown away.
“No,” said Anthony. “Not of me. Never. Leonard Puckett doesn’t envy anyone.”
“Of course he does. Everyone envies someone. Even Virginia Woolf! She envied Katherine Mansfield.”
“She did? I didn’t know that.”
“She did. It was a whole thing. I wrote a paper on it. Anyway, look at your father: he had all this commercial success, but then you came along and wrote, essentially, the Great American Novel.”
Anthony shifted uncomfortably. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
“No, really. A Room Within is amazing.”
“Thank you,” said Anthony. “I really appreciate that, I do. But then I went and did that stupid thing, and ruined all of it.”
It had been a really unwise thing to do, Lu agreed. “Why’d you do it?” she asked. “You’re so talented on your own.”
Anthony took a long time to answer. Finally he said, “It was a bad time for me. A real low point. I didn’t—I didn’t have my head on straight. I’m just starting to feel like I do now, a little bit. Don’t judge me. I mean, if you can help it.”
“Don’t worry,” Lu assured him. “I don’t judge anyone.” This was untrue. She judged Nancy. She’d judged the heck out of Jessica. She judged careless food bloggers who didn’t test their recipes enough before publishing them. But she wouldn’t judge Anthony. She needed a friend, and he was turning out to be a good one. She wasn’t going to judge her way out of that. “Also,” she said, “I have my own secret. Want me to tell you?”
Anthony’s eyes grew wide. “Of course,” he said. Lu lifted her wineglass, took a generous sip, and told Anthony everything about Dinner by Dad. Everything. The talking felt invigorating and purifying, like the middle stage of a juice cleanse, and when she was done Anthony said, “Wow. Holy cow. I can’t believe it. I’m so impressed! I’m going to go home and read all of your posts.”
Lu was secretly delighted, and also scared. A writer like Anthony Puckett reading her posts! “You don’t have to read all of them,” she said. “That would take you a while. I’ve been doing it for two years. Don’t tell Joy, okay? Maggie doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Really! I’ve never told anybody the whole story, except for you, right now.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” said Anthony. “Scout’s honor.”
“Were you a Scout?”
“Never.”
“Me either.” Lu’s mother hadn’t been around to drive Lu and her sister to afternoon activities, so they’d been limited to those that took place at school.
“Wait,” said Anthony. “Your husband doesn’t know?”
She shook her head. “No. He— I can’t tell him. He has . . . a very firm idea of how things should go. And this isn’t in his plan.”
Anthony nodded. “Okay,” he said. Then: “To secrets,” lifting his seltzer can.
Lu raised her wineglass. “To secrets.” They tapped, and they smiled at exactly the same time, and Lu felt like she’d found something she hadn’t even really known she’d been missing.