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carrots over the kitchen sink. Tom wore his Yankees cap and shouted in the other room as San Diego trounced Pittsburgh. Beer cans were lined up on the coffee table in front of Sean. Tom wished
bursitis on any pitcher he didn’t like; Sean popped open another beer and handed it to Tom.
    Jennie hated it when Tom shouted about baseball, so she went into the den and stood in front of the television with her arms folded. “Are you going to get cleaned up for dinner or not?”
    â€œI’m clean, I’m clean.” But Jennie wouldn’t move away from the television until he agreed to put on a shirt for dinner.
    We went down in the basement, where she kept frozen food the way pirates keep buried treasure. She pulled a string, turning on an overhead bulb, and opened a trunk big enough to house a polar bear. Inside were packets of meat, poultry, fish, all neatly wrapped in plastic and labeled in Jennie’s prize-winning handwriting. She dragged out half a cow she said would “do” for tomorrow. The next freezer was a vegetable garden hit with an unexpected frost. She came up with cauliflower and string beans. Then there was a freezer for baked goods, an icebox for cold drinks. Rummaging in a deep freeze for a cheesecake, Jennie asked what I heard from my brother.
    â€œOh, he’s fine, I guess.”
    â€œOh,” she said, trying not to sound surprised. “You aren’t in touch with him?”
    â€œHe’s somewhere in Europe. Sweden, I think. The last I heard he was in Sweden.”
    â€œWhat’s he doing in Sweden?”
    I’m not sure why I felt that Jennie was asking questions as if she knew the answers already, but it just seemed as if she was. “He’s writing his memoirs and living with a woman. God knows.” I brought Jennie up to date on my brother’s recent history. How he’d done a year of veterinary school but then couldn’t take it. How he’d managed to switch into Illinois med. “His teachers think he’s some kind of a diagnostic whizz. For some reason when he asked for a year’s leave they gave it to him. Who knows if he’ll ever go back now.”
    Jennie slammed the freezer shut and I got goosebumps on
my arms from the chill. “I’m sure he’ll go back. You know Zap. He’s just rebellious.”
    She spoke as if she had some private source of information about my brother. I was sure he’d go back to medical school as well. I also knew that he hadn’t been that rebellious until ten years before, when the woman he loved, Jennie Watson, went ahead and married Tom Rainwater.
    Shouts came from the den when we got back upstairs. Jennie understood that someone was on third and she could probably start the vegetables. She patted butter on the mashed potatoes and plunged a fork into the chicken like a picador. Sean came into the kitchen. “Want some help? It’s the bottom of the ninth, four to two.”
    Because I didn’t like him very much, I looked away. My eyes landed on the bulletin board over the kitchen table. There were numbers in case of emergency, lists of things to do, and lottery tickets. I wondered if Jennie wanted to win a lottery. There was a faded picture of her parents, good Midwestern Republicans who wanted everything done in its proper way, the way Jennie did it all in her proper way. They were smiling in front of their summer house in Door County, Wisconsin. They’d never liked dissenters, premarital sex, interracial marriages, or members of the lower classes.
    Jennie wasn’t Jewish, which my parents didn’t mind, but hers merely tolerated my presence in the Protestant household. They never explicitly said they didn’t like me, but they never laid out the welcome mat either. Jennie’s family fascinated me. The difference between our two houses was the difference of class, of race, of history. Her family lined up for everything—for the phone, for