"It smells fantastic," Roger clarified. His pelvis was cocked a few inches forward, and the handle on the zipper of his jeans poked out perpendicular to the track, like a stiff metallic tongue.
"Oh please," Gloria giggled. She was blushing and breathing only from her mouth.
"Rosemary?" said Roger. "Saffron?"
"Oh my, you really are a chef," Gloria said, and swatted his forearm. I found the gesture troubling, even though I had resigned myself to the fact, years ago, that women touch people more than men do.
Roger said something about the high cost of saffron, how he had even resorted to shoplifting it once, while keeping his eyes on Gloria. I had the sensation that we were both staring at the same spot on her blouse, where the center button strained from the pressure of her breasts, and the crenellated lines of silk pulsed like a star being born.

"Boys out of the kitchen!" Gloria shouted with mock-earnestness, and Roger and I shuffled back into the dining room, where childhood photos of a gawky Jenna occupied us until Gloria reappeared.
"My thing burnt," Jenna confessed from behind her mother's shoulder.
We sat down to eat, chicken breasts with rosemary and white wine sauce, rice pilaf and a lump of what Jenna had intended to be a vegetable saffron casserole and now resembled the heart of a comet. Gloria sat on my right at the head of the table and Jenna sat on my left. The men faced each other.
The food was bad.
"Why thank you for the compliments Roger," Gloria chirped. "I'll admit, this dish is one of the few things I can cook with my eyes closed. Jenna tried to zest it up with vegetables, but . . . "
"The oven is totally different," Jenna said. "It has these coils on the inside that get completely hotter than mine."
"Which coils?" I asked.
"They're shaped like horseshoes. They're in the back and they turn red."
"Switching ovens can throw you," Roger agreed.
Roger was left-handed. His forearm kept clashing with Gloria's as we ate.
"I love balsamic vinegar," Jenna said, and nobody answered.
When I tried to take Gloria's foot with mine I accidentally bumped Jenna's. She rubbed it against my ankle. Both mother and daughter had the habit of taking off their shoes while they ate.
"One day Jenna came home from school and I was opening a can of soup for her and she looked up at me with her pudgy little face and said, 'Mom, you're the best cooker in the world!' So I decided that day that I would learn how to really cook," Gloria said, laughing.
"I just got very hungry one day," Roger said. "And no one was around. That was my inspiration. Not too dramatic."
"Who needs drama?" Gloria said.
Jenna left to find another bottle of white wine. Roger described selling Internet subscriptions for a friend's start-up company. I dragged a finger across the oak table, drawing an ice skater with my finger, carrying her across the ice and then breaking her back on a fork. Gloria wanted to know how fast Roger could type. When she was single

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