Free Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

think we’re actually going to get married,” her voice wobbly with excitement, which is how he’d found out his parents weren’t married. But the needing part was the bigger mystery, because Marcus knew that Hart had nothing to do with their lives in any practical way, and that it was his grandmother who supported them.
    Grandma Mead was the widow of a long-dead man who had been a minor official on the New York Central Railroad. The tracks of an ancient branch line ran east and west behind the old farmhouse outside Rochester, where the old lady lived modestly on her husband’s pension. Every month she sent Summer, her only child, a check made out to Janet Parsons Mead, which was Summer’s name before she changed it during her freshman year in college.
    Their little gray house at the edge of Honesdale had been built by Grandma Mead’s parents in 1912, and Great-Grandma Parsons had died there at the age of ninety-six, leaving the house conveniently available for Summer to move into when she became pregnant with Marcus and quit college. Marcus was born there in the upstairs back bedroom, an event at which Tamarind and a woman named Songbird were present. They had invoked the Roman goddesses of childbirth, Hera and Artemis (and their lesser counterparts Cynosura and Adamanthea), to encourage Marcus’s emergence from the womb. Where Hart had been, Marcus never learned, though he once heard Grandma Mead say, “Leave it to the weasel to slink off the day his son is born.” His grandmother routinely called his father “the weasel,” so he figured Hart’s record of disappearing from their lives without warning had begun with his own birth.
    After Hart called to say he was coming back— coming home , Summer called it, though Hart never did—she cooked and baked for days. There were two pies and Hart’s favorite fig tart lined up on the kitchen counter, a coconut cake on a stand, and two kinds of homemade ice cream in the freezer—and those were only the desserts. She also made guacamole and a Provençal beef stew and a big kettle of a soup that always charmed Marcus: a rich broth with fluffy little dumplings in it, each one wrapped neatly around a crouton. When she was finished with all this, she had some time left, so she roasted a pork loin and made a batch of mango-lemon chutney and a loaf of potato bread. What Summer cooked didn’t always go together, but it was always good.
    Hart arrived in his own car this time, a beat-up Volvo wagon, and he was hungry, which pleased Summer. He looked handsome as ever, but skinny and haunted. He carried one suitcase, his computer in a leather case, and a shopping bag with BARNEY’S NEW YORK printed on it. From the suitcase, in addition to his usual collection of natty shirts and Italian shoes, he pulled a gray pin-striped Armani suit. He called it his art-dealer costume as he shook it out and hung it up in the closet. In the shopping bag there were presents. For Summer, a large box of Godiva chocolates and a painting done by Hart’s friend Joe Whack: a still life of a broken cup, a piece of burned toast, and a safety pin. “Joe’s new direction,” Hart commented, and said he’d chosen it because it was the only painting that was food-related. For Marcus, he brought a book of New York Times crossword puzzles and a Manhattan phone book containing a zip-code map of the city confirming that New York had many, many more than 196 streets. These were perfect presents.
    The three of them sat amicably around the kitchen table eating roast pork and chutney and fig tart and apricot-almond ice cream and the chocolates, and Marcus decided to think more kindly of his father.
    It wasn’t easy.
    Hart was more of a disciplinarian than Summer, who let Marcus do pretty much what he wanted. Hart made him take out the garbage, and go to his room when he talked back, and eat his goddamned beets or he couldn’t