Chapter 23: Under the Pie Dish

My mother arrived at Daniel's townhouse on Thursday in a navy raincoat, with a duffel bag in one hand and a canvas tool roll in the other.

She was sixty-three, five foot three, and she had driven a school bus for thirty-one years.

She looked at Daniel on the front step for a long time.

"You're tall," she said.

"I've been told."

"Susannah says you wiped your shoes twice for an eighty-four-year-old woman."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good."

She put the canvas roll in his hands.

"That was her father's."

Daniel unrolled it carefully.

Inside lay a single steel wrench, worn bright along the handle, with my father's initials scratched in the metal.

He held it in both palms and did not speak.

"Well?" my mother said.

"Which end?" Daniel asked.

She turned to me.

"She said you'd say that," she said, and walked into the house.

By Sunday there were five chairs at Daniel's kitchen table.

My mother had taken over the stove.

The old cook sat at the end in her gray cardigan and told her what was wrong with the gravy.

"It's perfectly good gravy," my mother said.

"It's good. It could be better."

"I've been making it forty years."

"Then you've had forty years to add pepper."

They had been circling each other since noon, and I had never seen my mother so happy.

At five the doorbell rang.

Daniel went to answer it, and came back with a face I could not read.

"It's for the cook," he said.

Esther stood in the hall behind him.

She wore a plain brown coat, and her silver bob had grown out uneven.

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