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inside the closet-sized pantry, on the kitchen chair she'd dragged in. She was searching the shelves for the pan she'd watched her mother use. Eddie ran his fingers through his hair and read the card again. The steps were complicated, with words like volume and decompression .
    "Do we have a dozen eggs?" he asked.
    "Eggs are in the refrigerator, right under your nose."
    At that moment, she sounded so much like her mother, it made his heart pound. Grace hadn't inherited the red hair, but her voice and mannerisms were eerily similar. He remembered when Kate was about Grace's age, sitting on the kitchen floor, sliding little cakes into her Easy-Bake Oven, and somehow getting perfect little pastries out of a forty-watt lightbulb. Eileen had tried to help her, but she wouldn't have any of it. That bossy confidence Eileen always called a Dunne trait would help Kate survive.
    "The refrigerator's this big white thing, right?" Eddie said.
    The refrigerator held two dozen eggs, neatly stacked in special trays from the Williams-Sonoma catalog. The swanky trays, one of Kate's many kitchen toys, replaced the paper egg cartons in the Dunne fridge. When Kate married Scott D'Arcy, a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, she threw herself fully into cooking. She took classes, inhaled cookbooks, and ordered pastry brushes and souffle pans from overpriced catalogs. All they'd ever talked about were things like presentation and "erbs." After Scott landed a job as a sous-chef at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, they began stockpiling money for a restaurant of their own. Kate worked double shifts at the hospital until the night Grace was born. But less than two years after that event, Scott took their dreams, and a twenty-two-year-old waitress, to Seattle, where he opened his own bistro.
    "Mommy only bakes late at night," Grace said. "When she can't sleep."
    "Well, that's when the real bakers work. The union bakers work late at night."
    "They can't sleep because they're worried, right? So they bake stuff."
    "Right. Union workers are always worried. It's good, though, because they make fresh rolls and cakes and doughnuts for the stores to have in the morning."
    "Is nighttime when the union says you're supposed to bake?"
    "In this house, you can bake anytime you want."
    "The union won't get mad?"
    "I know people," Eddie said.
    After Scott took off, Kate and Grace moved in with Eddie. But none of her other plans changed. For months, she'd been calling Realtors and scanning the classifieds, trying to get an idea of the total cash required to become a minor restaurateur. Eddie closed the refrigerator door and walked over to the open pantry in time to stop a falling cookie sheet from beaning his granddaughter.
    "Hey, chef," he said. "Do you know how to separate the whites of the egg from the yolk?"
    "Is the yolt the same as the shell?"
    "No, the 'yolt' is the yellow."
    "Okay, you just put the yolts on a dish, and the other stuff just goes in a bowl."
    Eddie returned to the sink for one more close read. Elbows on the sink, he held the smudged recipe card under the fluorescent light. He'd put the fluorescent light in at the same time he'd installed the bay window over the sink. Installing the bay window had been easier than baking this cake. He'd put the window in for his wife, who had seen all the world she cared to through those panes. In the last years of her life, Eileen went to Mass every morning, stopped at the superette, came home, and that was her day. The more Eddie's life revolved around things outside the house, the more Eileen became its prisoner.
    The window needed work. They all probably did. With his finger, he scraped the molding around the window frame. Dried-out caulking chipped off in his hand. He brushed the flakes into the trash as he watched a light-colored Chevy Impala move slowly down the street. The driver had the interior light on, reading something from a notepad. Not to worry. A marked NYPD car sat idling across the