Dear Edward(45)

Bruce says, “You’re vegan now?”

“I’ve been vegan for a few weeks. You just haven’t noticed me avoiding the dishes you cooked with dairy.” Jordan tugs the clear wrapper off the sandwich.

The move is hard for all of us, Bruce tells himself. He’s just expressing himself. That’s what teenagers do. Stay calm.

Bruce has always been the cook in the family, and when Jordan was a preschooler, the little boy showed up in the kitchen and asked to help prepare dinner. They had been partners ever since. At first, Jordan was given a butter knife, which he used to cut soft vegetables. He arranged food on plates. He tasted pasta to see if it was done, and sauces for saltiness. By the time he was ten, he was helping Bruce choose recipes. He received his own subscription to Bon Appétit for Hanukkah and pored over every copy, folding down the corner on recipes he wanted to try. Eddie became their taster, coming to the kitchen from the piano, or the book he was reading, to give the dish a thumbs-up. When Bruce pictured happiness, it was cooking in the kitchen beside Jordan while listening to Eddie play the piano in the next room. That scene repeated regularly and made Bruce thrum with joy. Every time, he thought, I will not take this for granted.

It was a year ago that Jordan had announced he was turning vegetarian for moral reasons. No more brisket, Sunday hamburgers, pasta Bolognese, steamed clams. Bruce hated the idea of one meal for Jordan and a separate meal for the rest of them, so he subscribed to the Vegetarian Times and cooked a meatless meal for dinner each night. Sometimes he made burgers for him, Eddie, and Jane, and a veggie burger for Jordan, or included a side dish with chorizo or pancetta—two of his favorites—which Jordan avoided. It had been hard, and Bruce had secretly hated it, but he’d made it work.

Vegan, though, was something else altogether. He says, “No egg or dairy? No cheese at all?”

“I should have gone vegan right away,” Jordan says. “It was morally weak of me. Cows on dairy farms are horribly abused. They’re impregnated using artificial insemination over and over again, and then their calves are torn away from them. And they’re genetically manipulated to produce ten times as much milk as they’re supposed to, so they spend their lives bloated and in agonizing pain. They die much earlier than they would normally.” He shakes his head. “It’s awful.”

“Ew,” Eddie says.

“And you don’t even want to hear about what happens to chickens.”

“That’s correct,” Bruce says. “I do not.”

Jordan narrows his eyes, as if assessing the man beside him. “Would you describe yourself as a moral coward?”

Bruce hesitates, taken aback. He can hear his wife whisper: This was your doing. You said you wanted the boys to be critical thinkers.

Eddie knocks his brother’s shoulder with his own. “Don’t be mean to Dad.”

“I’m not being mean.”

“Jordan’s correct,” Bruce says. “The facts are on his side. As a society, we treat animals terribly.”

“And,” Jordan says, “you should note that humans are the only species that drinks the breast milk of another mammal. You’ve never seen a kitten drinking goat’s milk, right? It’s kind of gross that we drink cows’ breast milk, when you think about it.”

Bruce rubs his eyes with his hands. What will I cook? he thinks. Almost all of his vegetarian recipes rely on cheese or cream. He feels a heavy weight spread across his chest. He had seen a photograph of the kitchen in the California house, shining stainless steel and double the size of the kitchen in their New York apartment. He’d been looking forward to cooking there. He’d thought that a week of their favorite recipes, filling the new house with familiar smells, would help them all feel at home.

“I’m not saying you have to be vegan,” Jordan says, perhaps picking up on his father’s melancholy. “If you want to continue to make animals suffer unnecessarily, be my guest.”

“Thank you,” Bruce says. “Thanks a lot.”

Linda regrets ordering the lunch tray as it lowers in front of her. The chicken sandwich blasts its chicken smell up her nose; no matter how she twists her head, she can’t escape it. The carrot sticks are depressingly orange and bendy. The only thing she’s pleased about is the cold can of Coke.

Florida, next to her, is eating a sandwich that she took out of her capacious bag. It smells delicious. She hums while she eats and flips through a ladies’ fashion magazine.

“Sweetheart,” Florida says, “you sound like a tire losing air. You need to calm down. Can you eat something?”

“No,” Linda says. “I can’t.”

“It’s early days in this situation.” Florida waves a hand at her midsection. “Anything can happen, so I wouldn’t start getting upset about not being able to pay for college yet.”

Linda’s chest tightens. She’s yet to make more than twenty-six thousand dollars a year. She was planning to look for work in California, but is it fair to take on a job when she’s pregnant? Something else occurs to her. She says, “I’m not supposed to be around that much radiation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m an X-ray technician.”

Florida’s face changes, and she pats the girl’s hand. “Ah,” she says. “Marie was a dear friend. What a firebrand she was. I lived two doors down from her.”