Chapter 20: Eleven at the Table

At 11:02 on Thursday, Patty came up my walk with two tins of lemon bars and a passenger.

The passenger was eighty-three, four foot eleven, and holding a green bean casserole in a Tupperware.

"I said alone," I said, at the door.

"You did," said Patty. "She's eighty-three and her daughter's in Phoenix."

"I can hear you," said the old woman, much too loudly. "I can't hear a word, but I can hear you."

I stepped back and let them both in.

By one o'clock there were eleven of us.

Will's partner had brought a pie and her wife's potatoes.

The receptionist from my office had brought her husband and a bag of rolls she swore were foolproof.

Will's sister and her husband had arrived with their two kids, nine and six.

The kids ran straight through the front room, and three adults told them to stop.

My table was a card table pushed against my regular table, with a bedsheet over the seam.

Patty peeled potatoes at my sink without being told twice, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her mouth in a line.

"You're doing it wrong," the old woman told her, from a kitchen chair. "You're taking off too much."

"I've been peeling potatoes since Eisenhower."

"And wasting them since Kennedy."

The rolls came out of the oven at 1:40.

I had them under the broiler for ninety seconds, and I looked away to answer the receptionist's husband, who had a question about gravy.

They were black.

They were not brown, or dark, or well done.

They were the color of a roof.

"Foolproof," the receptionist said faintly.

The nine-year-old held one up by the corner and knocked it on the counter.