I can’t believe what I saw: Vince, who’s just crossed the street, says some shit about the dead rooster killed by the dog, that Gus, here, in the vegetable shed, has been yakking about. I don’t hear the words clearly, but they set Charlie off. He lurches toward Vince, who’s backing up. Doesn’t say a word, but clocks him. The chillest man I’ve ever known floors the most arrogant with a single blow.

My first reaction is exhilaration, I’m ashamed to say, like some honky-tonk chick in a B movie, who’s got two guys going bare-fisted over her. I can see it all from the shed: a large-headed white woman screaming at Charlie as he walks away without a glance toward me, like we didn’t walk over here together to get vegetables; and Vince, on the dusty ground in his striped pants, talking himself into sitting up, beside a couple of fallen breadfruits.

I’m not ready to go out there. I move from the squash to the potatoes and start dropping good-sized russets with dirty faces into my sack. Gus, who, since we met in May, has taken a perverse pleasure in calling me Pita, rather than Pina, has the same idea as I did: “So you got your boyfriends fighting over you, Pita. Nice trick.”

I don’t respond. I keep dropping potatoes into the sack. When I’ve collected about twenty, Gus says, “What’s the deal here, Pita, are you buying all those potatoes or are you playing some kind of counting game?”

Why be offended by a geriatric sot, plopped on his ass ogling and disrespecting me?

“I’m buying them, Gus, unless you have a limit per person on russet potatoes.”

“They’re all yours, Sis.”

I plop more potatoes into my bag.

“So what are you going to do with all those taters?”

“Throw them at men I don’t like.”

“That’s a lot of men.”

“Some guys will get multiple potatoes, Gus.”

“Good thing you like me.”

“I might not waste a potato on you.”

I pile them up on the counter in front of Gus and watch as he struggles to get them all on the small scale, in fours and fives. When a couple of them slide off the scale and hit the ground, he gets all flustered.

I say, “You’re not used to potato-tossing women, are you, Gus?”

“You’re crazy as a loon, Pita.”

Vince is on his feet by the time I haul my twenty-three pounds of potatoes out of the shed. He’s taken off his mask and used it to wipe blood from the corner of his mouth.

“What you got there?” he asks.

I keep walking, taking lurching steps with my heavy load.

“Not getting a whole lot of love from you and Romeo,” Vince calls after me. “Why not come over to my pad and give me a little comfort, Pina?”

“Fat chance.”

“Tell Romeo that he’s got his coming.”

Once I haul the potatoes up the steps I drop them on the concrete landing to make a hearty boom. This brings Charlie to the door with a grin on his face.

“What was that all about?” I ask.

“It wasn’t premeditated.”

“Does that mean whenever the instinct strikes you, you’ll slug somebody?”

Charlie has lost his grin; instead he’s studying me. “Are you coming inside?”

“You done hitting people?”

He gazes down at my sack. “I see you bought a few potatoes.”

“I’m going to make latkes.”

“For the whole neighborhood?”

“I looked up latkes on the Times website; they have twenty-one different recipes.”

“And you’re going to make them all?”

I enjoy that neither of us answers the other. It’s a curious duet, like our relationship—a partita of unanswered questions.

“Is it cultural appropriation,” I ask, “for a gentile to make latkes?”

Charlie pulls the door open wider. That’s as close as he’ll get to truly inviting me in. I’ve made an executive decision: I’m not picking up the potatoes again—twenty-three pounds of brainless spuds plopped there in the cloth sack. I gather the mouth of it and drag the sack, humpty-dump over the threshold, into the hall and then across the wood floor, straight to the brick fireplace. The firewood is stacked, nobly in its rack, on the other side of the gaping black mouth. I spill out the humble potatoes, in twos and threes, and decide to make a small mountain of them. Charlie watches with his mouth open. Does he, like Gus, think I’m crazy as a loon? I stand back from the pile. Seen from a distance it might represent an entire civilization. Some freckled and misshapen, some with random eyes and sharp chins, this pile of brown roots most certainly predates us.

I get a call from Sally, who sounds more than a little bonkers. At least she gets down to business: “We need to do an intervention on my dad, Pina.”

“What’s he done now?” I ask, trying to bring a measure of levity to the conversation.

“This is no time to jest.”

“Who’s jesting?”

“I mean if you’re like in an oppositional state, Pina, I’ll find another ally.”

I hear the revved motor behind Sally’s voice; her mind’s running a mile a minute. “What’s the issue?” I ask in a flat voice that cannot be misconstrued.

“It’s an abdication . . .”

Is the poor girl referring to royalty? Has she just begun watching The Crown?

“A dereliction of duty.”

“What duty?”

“Charlie’s responsibility to Roscoe.”

“Has he not been feeding the parrot?”

“I think you’re purposely being oppositional, Pina.”

If she keeps saying that word I’ll take it as a suggestion. “I am not. Please explain.”

“Charlie has allowed Roscoe to go dormant, missing in action, right when we need him most. The Electoral College electors have confirmed Biden’s victory. Mitch McConnell has congratulated Biden and called on his fellow Repugnants to ditch their fraud conspiracy nonsense; the Georgia senate races are looming; cabinet appointments are being made, and where is Roscoe? We need his pithy statements, his wisdom, his joy. We can’t go on with this radio silence. Charlie has built a brand just at the point of taking off; now is the time to capitalize.”

Capital sounds like the key word. Sally is seeing dollar signs. At the risk of sounding oppositional I ask, “What if Charlie isn’t interested in perusing the brand idea?”

“Then he’s a fool,” his daughter says.

“Shall I relay the message?”

“You’re not useful at all, Pina.”

“Funny, I’ve been told that before.”

The conversation ends abruptly as Sally hangs up on me.

Tonight I make latkes for the second time, box-grating the potatoes in hopes they’ll be less like the Cuisinart-shredded taters of last night, which came out a bit like hash browns. I use Florence Fabricant’s recipe with four eggs and fifteen ounces of ricotta cheese. It makes forty small latkes and Charlie and I manage to eat thirty-one of them. We have apple slices, caramelized marvelously in butter after a slow sauté in Charlie’s copper skillet, and figure with the near-pound of ricotta that we don’t need a side of sour cream.

“As it is,” Charlie says, “our cholesterol readings are off the charts after two nights of latkes.”

“Do you think we can trigger simultaneous heart attacks?” I wonder. “We’d be inventing a new form of double suicide.”

Charlie’s expression turns thoughtful. “Death by latke. Have another one, Pina.”

I comply but when I ask Charlie to join me he demures. “Oh, so you want to watch me die.”

Then Charlie turns grim. He says he thinks we might all die given the way the virus is exploding and how many dumb yahoos in this country are still in COVID denial. “There’s guys on their deathbeds,” Charlie shouts, “unwilling to admit that it’s the virus that’s killing them. They want it to be cancer so bad.”

Charlie trots out numbers: 251,000 cases a day and 3,330 deaths. He tosses his hands in the air, exasperated. “I remember back in the summer, when we had 50,000 cases a day. Dr. Fauci said, ‘If we don’t wear our masks and avoid parties, we may see 100,000 cases a day. That forecast was shocking. Look at us now, we’re two and a half times that, and the Christmas disaster is right ahead.”

Over a salad of little gems and radicchio, with a sharp vinaigrette, I steered the conversation to the merits of each style of latke. Surprisingly we agreed that the first night’s latkes were the superior. “Both crisper,” Charlie says, “and more succulent.”

Next I tell Charlie about my conversation with his daughter.

“I think Sally’s using,” he says, “and I don’t know what to do about it, so I do nothing. That’s what Al-anon would recommend.”

Charlie’s head dips toward the table and I find myself looking at the bald spot in the center of his skull; it’s widened significantly since I’ve known him—the perfect year for a man’s hair to fall out. I reach over and grab Charlie’s hand.

If it weren’t for the virus,” he says, “I might be tempted to get in there and try to help Sally sort things out, and would probably fuck things up further.”

“Well, just so you remember that it’s Sally who wants to do an intervention on you.”

“And you weren’t tempted to help here?”

“Hmm. I might, you know, if you get too deep into the Roscoe branding thing.

Charlie rolls his eyes. “I could give a shit about the branding, but I agree with her that I should be utilizing Roscoe to get certain messages across—I’m just not sure what the messages are.”

I have nothing to add and, in a rarity for me, I stay quiet. When I am ready for bed, Charlie says he’ll come a little later—he wants to do some work with Roscoe.

When I leave the bathroom after brushing my teeth, I see Charlie’s torso bent over the kitchen sink. I mean to give him a goodnight kiss, but he’s eating persimmons. His friend Arrow left a supermarket bag full on the doorstep. We’ve been watching a bowl of them ripen on the kitchen table. I like how they look, but I no longer consider eating them. We used to throw them at each other as kids.

One night Charlie described the tree in Arrow’s backyard. “It’s absolutely bare, except for these exquisite fruits hanging like ornaments, with their smooth-faced gloss and otherworldly pigment. Standing underneath that tree when it’s in full bloom, I feel like I’m living inside a Persian miniature.”

At the sink, Charlie looks like he lives inside a persimmon itself. He’s halved five or six and is sucking the muted orange slime from the overripe halves, with absolute abandon. Polyps of gooey fruit stick to his face and drip from his chin into the sink. This, somehow, is the man I love.

A common nightmare wakes me. I’m trying to get home but always take the wrong alleys and stairways; I get so tired of the circuitous trails and flights of stairs that I wake myself and am glad to be here.

Charlie hasn’t yet come to bed. Certainly he’s finished slamming persimmons. I put on my kimono and creep over to Roscoe’s room. Charlie is instructing the parrot to project his voice. “Let it boom, Roscoe, let it boom.” Charlie’s forceful voice demonstrates what he means.

I stand a distance from the closed door, but I hear them well. Charlie has come up with some bad rhymes that evidently go over well coming from the mouth of a parrot.

“Roscoe here. I’m going to be terse, it’s getting wertz.”

“The word is worse, Roscoe, worse.”

“Wertz, wertz,” the bird says.

Charlie, ever patient and encouraging, says, “Listen closely now with your mighty parrot ears: worse, worse.

After several more attempts, Roscoe nails it.

“Bravo. Kudos. Praise be to you, Roscoe. Now, let’s take the message from the top.”

“From the roof, Charlie?”

“Yes, from the roof, and try to take it all the way through the end of the message.”

I still don’t believe that it’s a parrot doing the talking, coming up with metaphors and all the rest, and yet the alternative is more frightening. What if Charlie is responsible for both voices, tossing the alternate voice, like a ventriloquist, from one side of the room to the other, in a faux training session behind closed doors? Talk about an alternative reality. How far is this practice from hallucination and madness?

“Okay, here goes nothing, Charlie,” the voice of the parrot says, “Roscoe here: I’m going to be terse, it’s getting worse. Forget defiance, believe the science.”

“Excellent job, Roscoe. First rate.”

“Top notch, Charlie?”

“Indeed. Now let’s try it over again.”

I become weary while leaning against the wall, and soon I slowly slide down it, curl into a ball, and sleep. When I awake, who knows how much later, man and bird are still at it, now with a new message: “Roscoe here: I need to share it, you’ve got to wear it.”

Awake now, I want the parrot to depart, like the noxious qualities of a dream, like the coronavirus itself, but the bird’s voice rings out again, as if to address me directly: “Roscoe here: I want to be crystal clear, the virus isn’t going to disappear.”