LITMIR.BIZ

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My husband is not an impolite person, but when he looked up from the stove he said absolutely nothing and forgot to close his mouth. Time stretched. He was dying to look at me, but cutting away would have seemed unwelcoming. “Hey,” he said feebly.

      “Hey, bro, good to see you, man!” Edison clapped Fletcher’s shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who’d last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people’s transparent hypocrisy. They couldn’t say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile.

      “Tanner?” I led Edison over to where my stepson slouched at the table, taking in the scene while dawdling at his laptop. I could already read in the twist of his mouth the ruthless description of our new houseguest that he’d post on Facebook. “You remember your uncle Edison?”

      “Not really,” said Tanner warily.

      “Hell, kid, you’ve really shot up,” said Edison, extending his hand. “Can’t say I’d recognize you on the street, Tan.” Nobody called Tanner “Tan.”

      Tanner continued to slouch, so when he extended his arm to limply shake Edison’s hand it was from as far away as possible. “Can’t say I’d recognize you, either, Ed.” Nobody called Edison “Ed.”

      “So you’re seventeen? Figure my son Carson’s about your age,” Edison supposed.

      Tanner exclaimed, “You don’t even know?”

      That’s when Cody filtered into the doorway. With fair flyaway hair and a diffident manner, she was a shy girl, as I had been. Responding to her natural modesty and diligence, I’d tried for years not to show her any partiality over her more arrogant brother. Although no prodigy at the piano, the girl had a precocious sensitivity that would either be the making of her or would doom her for life as an easy mark. This was one of those moments in which she distinguished herself, for her instincts were pitch perfect. Cody took a mere instant to assess the situation, after which she ran to my brother crying, “Hi, Uncle Edison!” and gave him an unreserved hug.

      He hugged her back, hard. I wondered how many times recently anyone had held him like that—with joy, with affection, with no trace of distaste. I wished I’d hugged him that way myself.

      “So what’s cookin’?” asked Edison, hovering by the stove.

      “Ratatouille and shrimp with polenta,” said Fletcher.

      “I’m afraid the shrimp are only the frozen supermarket kind,” I said. “It’s the landlocked Midwest, and Fletcher decides the only animal protein he’ll eat is seafood.”

      “No prob—smells great!” Edison helped himself to a large nearby jar of peanuts and asked for a beer. I poured him a lager and followed him anxiously to the table. Fletcher had made the dining set, and the chairs all had finely curved arms—between which my brother was not going to fit.

      “I’m sure you’re worn out after your trip,” I said hastily, “but you may not be—comfortable in these chairs.” I did a rapid inventory: the living room was furnished with Fletcher’s rigid normal-size-person creations. But one broken-down recliner in the master bedroom was leftover from the days I lived alone; I’d refused to part with an ugly chair so sumptuous for curling up to read. My husband’s confabulations of oak, cedar, and ash were more sensuous for the eye than the ass.

      I tried to be offhand about it. Turning off the ratatouille, Fletcher was stoic, Cody eager to help. Once upstairs, my husband and I finally met each other’s eyes. Desperate to talk to him for hours, I could only shake my head in dismay.

      “Mom,” Cody whispered as we knelt on one side of the recliner and Fletcher took the other. “What happened to Uncle Edison?”

      “I don’t know, sweetie.”

      “Is he sick?”

      “According to the latest thinking on the subject”—we heaved to a stand—“yes.” Though I was personally unsure how labeling obesity an “illness” got anyone anywhere.

      “Does he eat too much?”

      “I think so.”

      “Why doesn’t he stop?”

      “That’s a good question.” We paused at the top of the stairs.

      “He makes me sad,” said my stepdaughter.

      “Me, too.” I kept my voice steady for her sake. “Very, very sad.”

      I was determined not to make a big deal out of this project, but the recliner was heavy, and in order to get it around the turn at the landing we had to tilt the chair on its side. A certain amount of huffing and Fletcher’s barked directions must have leaked to the kitchen. When we lugged in the recliner, Edison was holding forth to Tanner while leaning on the prep island. I felt bad about making him stand so long, which he must have found tiring. The peanuts were finished.

      “I’m not dissing Wynton Marsalis,” Edison was opining. “He’s brought in some bread, if nothing else. But the trouble with Wynton is he feeds this whole nostalgia thing, like jazz is over, you hear what I’m sayin’? Like it’s in a museum, under glass. Nothing wrong with keeping the standards alive, so long as you don’t turn the whole field into one big snoring PBS doc. ’Cause it’s still evolving, dig? I mean, you got a certain amount of lost free crap, which the public hates, and drives what few folks do listen to jazz even further into the ass of the past. Cats who blow all freaky don’t appreciate that even Ornette riffed on an underlying structure. But other Post-Bop cats out there are killing. Even some of Miles’s contemporaries are still playing, still innovating: Sonny, Wayne …”

      “Talk about ‘ass of the past,’” said Tanner, focused on his keyboard. “What’s with all the ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘dig’? That shit must have been pretty moldy by the time you were a kid.”

      “Yo, every profession got its patois,” said Edison.

      “It’s true, they really do talk like that,” I said, after we’d set the recliner down in the kitchen to rest. “I’ve visited your uncle several times in New York, and all the other jazz musicians talk the same way. Time warp. It’s hilarious.”

      When Edison withdrew his cigarettes, I urged him to the patio. We didn’t allow smoking in the house.

      “Jesus, it’s like he’s trying to sound like a jazz musician,” Tanner grumbled once Edison had shambled outside. “Like some stereotype of a jazz musician that wouldn’t wash in a biopic because it’s trite. You’re not going to tell me, Pando, that he grew up speaking jive.”

      “Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn’t mean it’s fake,” I snapped. “You could be a little more gracious. Like, give us a hand, because I think we’re going to have to move the table.”

      Lodging the chair at the head of the table was an operation, since the recliner wouldn’t fit in front of the step up to the living room without our moving the table a foot toward the patio door—which meant Tanner had to push his own chair right up against the glass. Reseated but cramped, he looked put out, doubly so when he had to get up again to let Edison inside. As my brother sank with obvious relief into the crazed leather cushion, I caught Fletcher appraising the room critically. He was house-proud. Now the room was off-center, and the dirty maroon eyesore hardly set off his dining table.

      “Hey, Pando, I almost forgot,” said Tanner, typing with the very urgency I had dreaded. “Some photographer called while you were gone, about a re-sked of the Bloomberg Businessweek shoot. Wish you’d pick up your damn iPhone. Taking a handwritten message on a pad is like carving on the wall of a cave.”

      “Oh,

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