The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

had her mouth washed out with soap by her third-grade teacher. Noelle who as a teenager used to say about some guy or another, “That’s the one I’m balling,” and Lily would look at her in benign amusement and say, “You’re balling him, Noelle? My understanding is he’s the one balling you.” Now religious Noelle with her long skirts and head coverings has become the language police. “I’m sorry, Noelle. The dang Stone Age. The gosh-darn Stone Age. The dickens of a Stone Age.”
    “How about just the Stone Age?”
    “All I’m saying is I’d like to get cell phone coverage up there.”
    “And all I’m saying is I’d appreciate it if you minded your language.”
    “Yes, Noelle. You’ve made your point.”
    Ahead of them, a deer stands next to the road, looking from side to side, as if checking out the traffic. “Don’t you dare,” Lily says.
    “What?”
    “I was talking to the deer.” She drives around a bend, and when they emerge into the clearing, they are surrounded by huge stalks of corn and, beyond them, patches of butter lettuce. A sign at the side of the road reads MEATBALLS , NACHOS , WATER . They pass an ad for an animal clinic, with the words IAMS SOLD HERE .
    “Why do you need cell phone service, anyway? Can’t you stand to be unwired for a few days?”
    “I have work to do, Noelle. This holiday hasn’t exactly come at a good time.”
    “Well, it’s not good for any of us. Do you think it’s easy to fly in from Israel? Or cheap?”
    “I assumed Mom and Dad helped you out.”
    “Well, they didn’t.”
    “Or Grandma. You’re always asking Grandma for money.”
    “That’s not true.”
    Lily looks at her.
    “Well, sometimes.”
    Lily nods, feeling as if she’s proven a point, though she doesn’t even know what that point is.
    They drive past Ludlow, where the grass is lined with yellow flowers and where, beyond a wooden fence, horses are at a feed trough and a woman in a straw hat is navigating a tractor. Through the window, Lily takes in the smell of freshly mown grass.
    “Grandma could help you out, too,” Noelle says. “And if you weren’t so pigheaded you’d let her.”
    “I don’t need Grandma’s money.”
    “But Malcolm does, doesn’t he? Isn’t he trying to open his own restaurant?”
    “What does that have to do with Grandma?” Malcolm has found a building on Capitol Hill, where there’s been a dining boom, and he’s been getting good press—he had a full-page photo in the Washingtonian in an article about D.C.’s best young chefs—and now all he needs is financial backing. A lot of it. But if Noelle thinks Malcolm should ask Gretchen for help, she misunderstands their grandmother entirely. Gretchen could fund Malcolm’s restaurant singlehandedly and she wouldn’t even know the money was missing. Gretchen’s first husband, Lily’s paternal grandfather, died of a heart attack when Lily’s father, their only child, was six, and she subsequently outlived two other husbands, both of whom were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, neither of whom had children. So Gretchen inherited everything they owned. She speaks of this with pride. What others might call greed she sees as discernment: she knows whom to marry. Gretchen is ninety-four and lives alone in an enormous apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met, where, Lily suspects, she’s busy honing those powers of discernment, determining whom best to bat her eyelashes at. At heart, she’s an insecure woman who believes people value her only for her money; if that’s true, Lily thinks, it’s because she has brought it on herself. She’s always promising people money, then breaking those promises; she rewrites her will every year. She demands strict devotion from her family, and she likes to pit the grandchildren against each other, writing a check to one that’s slightly larger than her check to the next one, all based on her quixotic assessment of who reveres her most. If Malcolm wants Gretchen to