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toward Chef Voden. Many nights a week she walked in the door to find
     him in a blue-and-pink-striped denim apron pulled tight around his stout middle, his glasses fogged from steam or exertion,
     the two or three damp hairs on his pate flattened against his shiny scalp. The chops were simmering in their glaze, the rolls
     baking in the oven, the sliced Ida Red apples bubbling in their cider reduction, the wine taking one heavenly breath after
     another. Their daughter was grown, Frank was in the kitchen, and for as long it lasted, she, Jenna Faroli, was blessed among
     women. The beauty of his industry! Once summer was full-blown, he would begin working on his book about jurisprudence, a tome
     that would run, if his other books were any indication, to fifteen hundred pages. She would enjoy his gastronomic feats, his
     culinary acrobatics, while she could.
    The night of the bouncing globes, Frank had gone on from the subject of aliens to tell her about a fistfight that had occurred
     between two men in Athens, Ohio. Jenna had a fair amount of work to do and was feigning interest as best she could. One fellow
     in Athens believed that the Earl of Oxford had written the Shakespeare plays, whereas the other, a Stratfordian, was defending
     the honor of the Bard.
    “Uh-huh,” Jenna said again.
    The trouble had begun in a chat room and escalated to the street, the two men, coincidentally in the same town, the two men,
     Frank said, surely yelling in iambic pentameter, while trying to puff up their puny chests. He flung his knife from side to
     side, crying,
    “Pale trembling coward, there I throw my gage,
    Disclaiming here the kindred of the king,
    And lay aside my high blood’s royalty….”
    Jenna pushed back in her chair. In the morning, she reminded Frank, she had two authors, a British woman who trained dogs,
     and a memoirist who had acquired four springer spaniels after he had been in an accident that damaged his frontal lobes. Those
     two would fill the first half of the program, and for the second a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins would speak about therapies
     for the impaired, and, finally, the actress Teri Garr would be in the studio to discuss her struggle with MS and her crusade
     to help those who suffered from the disease. The shows were often patchworks, including segments that invited callers, and
     others that were pretaped and edited. Tomorrow’s program was live throughout, but in any case Jenna always liked to be overprepared.
    “You should invite the Shakespeare thugs in,” Frank was saying. “You’d get a tremendous number of callers, and there would
     be the threat of real violence to keep everyone on the edge of their car seats.” He was off again:
    “’Tis not the trial of a woman’s war,
    The bitter clamour of two eager tongues,
    Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain.
    The blood is hot…”
    The Honorable Judge Voden leaned back and, dabbing his white linen napkin to his mouth, he giggled.
    “I’ll keep it in mind,” Jenna said. With a glass of port in hand, she walked around the table to his chair and bent to kiss
     his head. “Thank you, Frankest, for the remarkable grub.”
    She did her best to read as much of her guests’ books as she could, but she had also, through the years, become adept at scanning
     the pages for the heart of the matter, and zooming in on paragraphs that her producers had highlighted, those that offered
     up suitable questions. Jenna’s standard line, when asked about her preparation, was that the author had put his time and talent
     and energy into his work and she would respect that labor by reading thoughtfully. It was said that she was thorough, fearless,
     and polite. This pleased her, and she hoped it was true. Her goal, always, was to find something to like in her guest no matter
     how distasteful his opinions, no matter if his book turned out to have wasted the nation’s resources. She tried not to care
     what a guest thought of her. The pact