How to Fix Everything First, there were the casseroles: strange combinations of chicken, canned chilies and potato chips, or green beans, cream of mushroom soup and fried potato sticks. Then there were the Jell-O salads, shaken out of greased Bundt pans and shimmering on cut-glass plates; some salads were clear and some creamy, some with celery or carrots and others with canned pineapple or fruit cocktail. A percolator chirped on the sideboard, brewing church-hall-style coffee, watery and bitter. Coca-Cola, ginger ale, Sprite and tonic water sat on the kitchen table, their condensation rings soaking the tablecloth. We had no air conditioning, and it was early July. Heat radiated from the walls and from bodies crowded into a house that now seems so small. I was 4 years old and underfoot, dodging the calves and knees of adults towering over me—loud, balding or white-haired men and their wives, coiffed hair stiff even in the wet air. Glass ashtrays, the kind you could kill someone with in a black-and-white film, weighed down tables. My grandfather had just died.