For as long as he could remember, even before he had tried other people’s cooking, Ethan hated his mother’s food. Over-salted vegetables, their greenhouse flavors drowned in sodium chloride, greyed into mush for ease of gumming, like the purées she claimed she handmade when he was a baby. He looked around the room. This stultifying, tiny room, split off from the stultifying, tiny room he had waited eighteen long years to outgrow. The certificate of his conception and the yellowing news clippings around his birth clung to a faded green pinboard. There was builders’ noise and dust outside the window,