It’s February in New York City, and I’m the only one in the family still speaking to my grandmother. That’s not quite true; my father, her son-in-law, will talk to her, too. But he can’t take off from work today, so it’s up to me to get her across town to an urgent hematologist’s appointment. My sister, my mother, my aunts, and my female cousins around the city are at the moment somehow all on bad terms with Grandma Helen, but not my father and I. Men are rare in the family: I’m the first boy born in generations; he’s one of the few husbands to survive past sixty. Rather than relate to us with the familiarity that so often leads to disagreement, Helen regards us with the polite suspicion due outsiders.