Chapter 23: A Table with Six Chairs

The kitchen at Pell Street had four chairs, and on Sunday there were six of us.

Finbar arrived with two folding stools from the bike shop under his arms and announced that they were a loan.

"Of course they are," Celia said, taking the pencil from behind her ear to tick him off a list. "You loan things you've stolen."

"I paid for them."

"With whose money?"

"Mine. Which is, as of Thursday, bike shop money plus a share of a freight firm."

"Sit down, both of you," Edwin said mildly, and hung his navy blazer on the back of a chair.

He had brought a bottle of wine and a bunch of tulips.

He stood at the sink for ten minutes, trying to arrange them in a measuring jug.

Nobody told him to stop.

The sixth chair was for the nurse.

She came last, in the grey raincoat, with a pie in a cloth.

She stood in the doorway until I pulled out her chair.

"My visa came through on Friday," she said. "I may stay as long as I like."

Celia put down the knife she was holding and hugged her, and the nurse said, "Oh, goodness," and let herself be hugged.

I looked down the length of the table.

There was my father with his tulips and my brother on a borrowed stool.

There was my friend with her pencil, and a woman who had listened to me call a name down a corridor for a month.

And there was a man at the stove.

Padraig was making dinner.

He had insisted.

He had been at the stove since four, with a tea towel over his shoulder.

The kitchen smelled strongly of burnt toast.

"Is that smoke?" Finbar asked.

"It's the potatoes."

"The potatoes are on fire."

"The potatoes are caramelized," Padraig said, and the grill pan hit the draining board with a clang.

"He scrapes them," Celia told the nurse. "He scrapes everything."

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