They didn’t like too many ingredients, these parents of Matthew’s friends, or even too many dishes to choose from. And often, he’d noticed, they ate their meals in a certain order—all the meat, then all the starch, then all the vegetables. Every single one of them left the vegetables for last, like overgrown children. They didn’t like the different foods to mingle on their plates, and they didn’t seem to like meat to be carved at the table, or sauce, or gravy, and there was a near-universal distrust of salad dressing.
Once they had the parents of Matthew’s friend Carolyn over and Carolyn’s mother had come up to Graham in the kitchen afterward as he was stacking plates in the sink and thanked him for making lasagna. “It was such a treat!” she’d said in a low voice. “Colin doesn’t like me to make anything but meat and potatoes.”
Graham was startled. “What, all the time? No exceptions?”
“Not really,” she said. “I mean, on Fridays we have hamburgers and French fries, but the other nights, it has to be meat and potatoes.”
How did she manage that? Were there six different combinations of meat and potatoes? He began thinking aloud. “Steak and baked potatoes, pork chops and mashed potatoes…”
The woman beamed. “Exactly! And one night I make ham with potatoes au gratin.”
“Pot roast,” Graham said thoughtfully.
“With roasted potatoes,” she finished helpfully.
“Does he eat chicken?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said. “Roast chicken.” She put enough emphasis on the word roast to make Graham sure that it was roast chicken only, nothing fried or breaded or sautéed. “With hash browns.”
“And what about the seventh night?” Graham asked.
“Cottage pie.”
Well, wasn’t she the sneaky one with that cottage pie! He hadn’t thought of that.
“And that’s it?” he said. “No pasta or rice or pizza?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Colin is very old-fashioned.”
Old-fashioned? Unacceptably rigid was more like it, Graham thought. Difficult. Impossible. Life without pasta or pizza? Who could live like that? Had she known it when she married him? Were there compensations? (He could hear Colin and Audra talking in the dining room and Colin was saying something about how the law of unintended consequences was affecting gas prices, so if there were compensations, they weren’t readily apparent.)
Now—especially now, when Audra might be pregnant—Graham began to wonder with more and more frequency where he and Audra fit on this sliding scale of parental Asperger’s. He didn’t have a problem with food, and Audra would eat anything—literally anything, it seemed. Twinkies, Spam, pork rolls, beef jerky, Lucky Charms, Hot Pockets, tapioca. He wondered sometimes if her genes had been spliced with a goat’s. And as far as he could tell, they had good social skills. Why, Audra was the most social person he had ever known.
But still. But still. There were other family members’ genes to consider. Graham’s uncle, for instance, who was so scandalized by the price of food that his wife used to stop by the side of the road on her way home from the supermarket and scrape the price tags off all the groceries to prevent him from going berserk. That same uncle had very rigorous criteria when it came to how the carpet should be vacuumed. “In an expanding wave pattern!” he used to say. “Like a seashell! Is that too much to ask?” (Well, yes, it is.) And Audra had a cousin who could not understand or recognize even the most common idioms. You could say, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and he’d look out the window with a slightly fearful expression. And Graham’s own cousin with the miniature-train collection that no one else was allowed to touch. And Audra’s uncle with the fear of acorns. The great-grandmother with the alphabetized linen closet. The aunt—
It really did not bear thinking about, all the strange relatives, all those peculiar genes floating around in their gene pool. But Graham could not seem to stop.
—
“I feel so bad for the baby,” Audra said to Graham. “It’s going to have such old parents.”
“Bad for the baby?” Graham said. “What about me? I’ll be seventy-five by the time the baby graduates high school.”
Another baby? Impossible. Really impossible.
“If I am pregnant,” Audra continued, “the first thing we’re going to do is invest in a Bugaboo stroller. Remember that awful stroller we had when Matthew was a baby? The one that was, like, two inches too wide to fit through any doorway? And I would have to lift him out and hold him and then try to get the stroller to snap shut with one hand? Because it was supposed to just collapse if you pressed this one button, but I could never do it. I tell you, that is my worst memory of Matthew’s babyhood, standing there in doorways, shaking this stupid stroller while people tried to get past me.”
That was her worst memory of Matthew’s babyhood? What about the sleep deprivation? Graham could remember realizing that if they had ten minutes, he and Audra ate something; if they had twenty minutes, they slept. He remembered seeing Audra walk down the hall toward the baby’s room in the very early morning, trailing her hand along the wall. At first he thought it was to help her find her way in the dark—then he realized that it was already light. She was touching the wall to help her stay upright.