Chapter 23: Mireille's Table

Mireille signed her name on the ballroom table, between the cake and the candles.

She wrote it fast, in blue ink, with a pen she took out of my hand.

Her husband stood there and watched her do it.

When she finished, she capped the pen and handed it back to me, and her fingers did not shake.

"Voilà," she said. "Finished."

She turned around and walked out of the ballroom in her gray dress.

She did not look back at the table. I followed her through the lobby and out into the snow.

She stood on the club steps for a long moment, with her face turned up to the dark sky.

Then she started to laugh.

It was not a happy sound.

She was letting go of eight years and finding her hands empty.

I put my coat around her shoulders and held her until it turned into crying.

She came to live in my house on the first of January.

She had two suitcases and a box of her grandmother's recipes, and she took the guest room at the back.

On the second day she was standing in my kitchen at six in the morning with the oven on and flour up to her wrists.

"What are you making?" I said.

"Tourtière. For the neighbors. It is what you do in Québec when someone has had a hard year."

"Is the neighbor me?"

"Yes. Eat."

I sat down at the table and watched her roll out the pastry.

She did it the way Mawmaw had, with her whole weight on the pin.

For eight years I had been angry with Mireille.

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