Chapter 10: The Loading Dock

My mother opened the screen door all the way.

"Come in, Ray," she said. "You'll wake the neighbors."

He stepped over the threshold sideways.

He set the cat carrier on the kitchen table.

Mabel came out and walked straight across the sugar bowl to Lindsey's lap on the sunporch.

Ray stood in the middle of the linoleum with his hands hanging.

"I don't have anything to say," he said. "I wanted to be here."

"That's a fine thing to say," my mother told him, and put the kettle on.

He sat at our yellow table at three in the morning with a mug of chamomile.

He was still in his good shirt, with the dry cleaner's tag stuck to the sleeve.

He did not speak again until dawn, and my mother let him not.

Around seven I came out and found him asleep upright in the chair, with her afghan over his knees.

On Sunday afternoon my mother insisted on going to the Armory.

The Veterans Thanksgiving pantry packs four hundred boxes every year, the Sunday before the Gala.

My mother has run its kitchen for eleven of those years.

"I'm not going to sit home with a letter," she said. "I'll go sit with sixty pounds of potatoes."

Lindsey came too, and so did Ray, who was put on peeling.

I watched him hold a peeler.

Tom was in the back with a hand truck, stacking crates of canned yams.

At four o'clock my mother lifted a forty-quart stockpot off the shelf without asking anyone.

Her right knee gave out underneath her.