While neither Danny’s second nor third novel would make him any money, the cook had increased his savings in Iowa -enough to buy the old storefront space with the apartment above it on Brattleboro ’s Main Street. That was the year Avellino was born-when Danny was commuting to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was the closest college-teaching job that the writer could find, but the distinguished and somewhat staid women’s college was well over an hour’s drive (nearly two) from Putney-a long commute in the winter months, if it was snowing. Still, living in Putney mattered to Danny. No small part of it was his high opinion of the Grammar School-within walking distance of home-where Joe would finish the eighth grade before going off to Northfield Mount Hermon.

The cook was shaking his head as he limped into his restaurant, because he was thinking that Daniel truly must love living in the country. Tony Angel didn’t; the North End had made a city man out of him, or at least he was a neighborhood kind of guy. But not Daniel. He’d made the commute to that women’s college for three years, before The Kennedy Fathers was published in ’78; the novel’s success had freed him from ever having to teach again.

Of course there’d been more money suddenly, and the cook had worried-he still worried-about what effect it might have on young Joe. Daniel was old enough (thirty-six) when the bestseller business found him to not be affected by either the fame or the good fortune. But when Joe was only thirteen, the boy woke up one morning with a famous father. Couldn’t this have made an unwelcome mark on any kid that age? And then there were the women Daniel went through-both before and after he was famous.

The writer had been living with one of his former Windham College students when he, Tony, and Joe moved to Iowa City. The girl with a boy’s name-“It’s Franky, with a y,” she liked to say with a pout-hadn’t made the move with them.

Thank God for that, the cook thought at the time. Franky was a feral-looking little thing, a virtual wild animal.

“She wasn’t my student when I began to sleep with her,” Danny had argued with his dad. No, but Franky had been one of his writing students only a year or two before; she was one of many Windham College students who never seemed to leave Putney. They went to Windham, they graduated, or they quit school but continued to hang around-they wouldn’t leave.

The girl had dropped in on her former teacher one day, and she’d simply stayed.

“What does Franky do all day?” his dad had asked Danny.

“She’s trying to be a writer,” Danny said. “Franky likes hanging around, and she’s nice to Joe-he likes her.”

Franky did some housecleaning, and a little cooking-if you could call it that, the cook thought. The wild girl was barefoot most of the time-even in that drafty old farmhouse in the winter months, when Daniel heated the whole place with a couple of woodstoves. (Putney was the kind of town that worshipped woodstoves, Tony Angel had observed; there was even an alternative to heating in that town! The cook simply hated the place.)

Franky was a dirty-blonde with lank hair and a slouchy posture. She wore funny old-fashioned dresses of the kind the cook remembered Nunzi wearing, except Franky never wore a bra, and her underarms-what the cook saw of them-were unshaven. And Franky couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three when she’d lived with Daniel and little Joe. Daniel had just turned thirty when they went to Iowa.

There’d been more young women in the writer’s life in Iowa City, one of his workshop students among them, and while there was no one special now-nor had there been anyone long-lasting since Danny Angel became famous-Joe, by the time he was a teenager, had seen his dad with numerous young women. (And three or four notably older women, the cook was remembering; two of those ladies were among Daniel’s foreign publishers.)

The Putney property was a virtual compound these days. The writer had turned the old farmhouse into his guesthouse; he’d built a new house for himself and Joe, and there was a separate building where Danny did his writing. His “writing shack,” Daniel called it. Some shack! Tony Angel thought. The building was small, but it had a half-bathroom in it; there was also a phone, a TV, and a small fridge.

Danny may have liked living in the country, but he wasn’t exactly reclusive-hence the guesthouse. In his life as a writer, he’d gotten to know a number of city people, and they came to visit him-the occasional women included. Had Joe’s exposure to his famous father’s casual relationships with women made the teenager something of a playboy at prep school? Tony Angel wondered. He worried about his grandson-as much as, if not more than, the boy’s dad did. Yes, the eighteen-year-old’s drinking would bear watching, the cook knew. Joe had the mischievous insouciance of a boy who liked to party.

With the war in Vietnam, they would lower the drinking age in many states to eighteen, the logic being that if they could send mere boys off to die at that age, shouldn’t the kids at least be allowed to drink? After the war was over, the drinking age would go back up to twenty-one again-but not until 1984-though nowadays, Tony knew, many kids Joe’s age had fake I.D.’s. The cook saw them all the time at Avellino; he knew his grandson had one.

It was how Joe was more than fast with girls that really worried Tony Angel. Going too fast too soon with girls could get you in as much trouble as drinking, the former Dominic Del Popolo, né Baciagalupo, knew. It had gotten the cook in trouble, in his opinion-and Daniel, too.

Despite Carmella’s best efforts, Tony knew all about her catching her niece Josie with Daniel; the cook was sure that his son had banged more than one of those DiMattia girls, and even a Saetta and a Calogero or two! But young Joe had at least seen, if not actually overheard, his father in a few more adult relationships than whatever foolishness Daniel had been up to with his kissing cousins. And his grandfather knew that Joe had spent more than a few nights in the girls’ dorms at NMH. (It was a wonder the boy hadn’t been caught and kicked out of school; now, in the spring term of his senior year, maybe he would be!) There were things Joe’s dad didn’t know, but his grandfather did.

In his frantic last night in Twisted River, the cook had prayed-for the first and only time, until now. Please, God, give me time, Tony Angel had prayed, long ago-seeing his twelve-year-old’s small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. (Daniel had been waiting in the passenger seat, as if he’d never lost faith that his father would safely return from leaving Injun Jane’s body at Carl’s.)

For all the talking the cook and Ketchum did about Danny Angel’s novels-not only about what was in them but, more important, what the writer seemed to be purposely leaving out-the one thing the men noticed without fail was how much the books were about what Danny feared. Maybe the imagination does that, Tony thought, as he peeked under the damp towels covering his pizza dough; the dough hadn’t risen enough for him to punch it down. Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The stories often indulged the nightmarish-namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril-in part, because they were young!

Tony Angel wasn’t much of a reader anymore-though he’d bought innumerable novels (on his son’s and Ketchum’s recommendations) at The Book Cellar. He’d read a lot of first chapters and had just stopped. Something about Ketchum’s relationship with Rosie had kicked the reading right out of the cook. The only novels he actually finished-and he read every word-were his son’s. Tony wasn’t like Ketchum, who’d read (or heard) everything.