Chapter 24: Come In

Forty people came to my second housewarming, and this time the kitchen door was shut.

They stood in the hall with paper plates and plastic cups, and every one of them kept looking at it.

Eli had spent three weeks inside that room.

He had hung the white oak cabinets on the wall where I had drawn them.

He had set the island in, the whole twelve feet of it, and bolted the pantry wall into place.

The farmhouse sink was the last thing to go in.

He had lifted it with one hand while I held the level.

On the day it was finished, he had stood in the middle of the floor and said nothing for a while.

Then he'd said, "That's the best thing I ever made."

"I drew it," I'd said.

"You did," he said. "That's why."

Now he stood in the hall beside me in a clean flannel shirt.

His beard was trimmed, and he had sawdust on one cuff anyway.

"Ready?" he said.

"Ready."

My mother had a cake. My father had his good tie on.

The neighbor with the coffee mug had brought a casserole and a bottle of wine.

He kept clapping me on the shoulder.

A man in the back of the hall raised his cup.

He was the guest from the first party, the one who had wandered into the bare room and asked where the kitchen was.

"I was told I'd get my chance," he called out. "I've been waiting a month for that green stove."

People laughed.

I walked to the kitchen door and put my hand on the knob.

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