Chapter 17: Sunday Dinner

My mother's dining room seats twelve if two of them are children.

On Sunday it held fourteen.

Both aunts had come, and three cousins with their husbands.

A baby in a high chair was banging a spoon on the tray.

The pot roast was on the table.

My mother stood at the head of it in her good blue cardigan, saying grace.

Robin sat at her right hand, where she had sat every Sunday since our father died.

She was eating nothing and watching the door.

I came in late, on purpose.

"Joanna," my mother said. "We started without you."

"I'm not here to eat."

Sam had driven me.

He was in the car at the curb with the engine off.

I had asked him to wait there, and he had said all right.

I walked around the table and stopped across from my sister.

She put down her fork.

"Jo," she said, very softly. "Not here. Please."

"Colleen told you to stay away from this house, and you came anyway. That's what Carlton said."

The room went quiet in pieces.

One of my aunts stopped passing the rolls.

"I came to give you something," I said.

I took the folder from my bag and laid the deed on the tablecloth between the potatoes and the gravy boat.

It sat there, stamped and official, with my name on the line at the bottom.

"That's my signature," I said. "According to the county."

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