Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner Page B

“Top Chef” recipe, but when he followed the link he found that the very first ingredient was golden raisins, and his mother hated raisins. He stood up with a sigh and a groan and went into the kitchen, where he found his father standing in front of the refrigerator, peeling slices of cheese from a package of provolone, rolling them into cylinders and sliding them into this mouth. Wes ignored him and went to the row of cookbooks lined up on a warped shelf above the counter. There were a great many of them, thirty or forty, representing every ethnic group in Queens, but he could not recall when he had last seen anyone reach for one. Wes had been the chef of record at home for some time, and it was true that he could cook just about anything from a recipe, but with homework and SAT prep he tended to keep it simple these days, sticking to the dishes that he knew Nora would eat—macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with sautéed vegetables, breaded chicken cutlets, steak, the sort of food they might eat if they lived in Indiana, he imagined. His father was the better cook, but he rarely had the energy for it these days, and refused to descend to the children’s standards.
    â€œCan I have some money? I need to go shopping for dinner.”
    With his free hand his father pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it to Wes.
    â€œTake what you need. What are you making?”
    â€œSweetbreads.”
    â€œYou’ve gotta be kidding me.”
    â€œThat’s what Mom asked for.”
    â€œCount me out. I’ll have cereal. Can’t stand sweetbreads. Barely stand to look at them.”
    â€œMom wants it to be a family night. You have to.”
    â€œHave my wallet back?”
    His father left the room and Wes turned to the cookbooks. After coming up blank in the first half dozen, he finally found what he was looking for in
The Union Square Cookbook
—“seared sweetbreads with mushrooms and frisée”—although the idea of wilted frisée struck him as excessively gallic, and he thought he might substitute baby bok choy, if it was available. He typed the list of ingredients into a new memo on the notepad app of the iPhone. As he typed, his eyes wandered down the various steps of the recipe. The sweetbreads were to be soaked for an hour in ice water, which would have to be changed every fifteen minutes; they were then to be poached for three minutes, drained, cooled in fresh cold water, trimmed of fat and connective membranes, and pressed under a weighted plate for five hours. Only then were they to be dredged in flour and fried to a golden brown. Wes trudged back upstairs and leaned in at his mother’s door.
    â€œMom, it’s going to take about seven hours. Are you sure you . . . ?”
    â€œLeslie, do I have to tell you . . . ”
    â€œOkay, okay. Where’s Nora?”
    â€œI don’t know, Leslie.”
    Wes left the house and turned east, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his hoodie. The streets were crowded now, mostly with people Wes deemed to be tourists and daytrippers from the outer boroughs and the suburbs because they walked too slowly and did not look intelligent enough to live in Greenwich Village. The sidewalks were narrow, and even when the crowds were sparse they were strewn with obstacles—trees and fenced beds, garbage cans, fire hydrants—that had to be negotiated. Now they were lousy with invaders, all of whom imagined themselves to be an integral part of the life of the city; Wes had to turn sideways just to squeeze past them. How he hated them, with their high-tech strollers, their pristine sneakers and shopping bags and Jersey license plates, all converging on his neighborhood from places that no one would ever want to visit, let alone live in. They were all so puffed up and pleased with themselves because they had purchasing power and hard-to-secure reservations, but they were the kind of people who would