Chapter 12: The Cook

The old woman lived on the third floor of a brick apartment building in Danbury, and she opened the door before we knocked.

She was eighty-four years old and no taller than my shoulder.

She wore a gray cardigan and held a wooden spoon in one hand.

"You're the one with the plate," she said to me.

"Yes, ma'am."

She looked at Daniel. "You're the tall one. Wipe your shoes."

He wiped them twice.

The apartment smelled of tea and old paper.

On the kitchen table, next to a pot with a knitted cozy, was a photo album open to its first page.

She had been waiting for us.

I sat down across from her, and Daniel took the chair by the window.

"I cooked for the Kittredge family for twenty-six years," the old woman said. "From 1982 until the old man died."

She tapped the table.

"I was the cook. That's all I'll ever be called, and I've never minded it."

"Thank you for ringing me."

"I rang because of the plate."

She turned the album toward me.

The photograph on the left was small and square and faded to orange.

It showed a long kitchen with a black iron stove.

A young woman in a gray dress and a white apron stood by the sink with a dish towel over her arm.

She had a narrow jaw and a straight back, and she was not smiling.

I knew that jaw.

I had watched it set across a Thanksgiving table.

"That's Esther," I said.

"That's Esther at twenty-two."

I looked at the date written in blue pen at the bottom.

1986.

"She came to the house in 1983," the cook said. "Nineteen, with a cardboard suitcase."

"Her people were from a mill town in Pennsylvania, and the mill had shut. The old Mrs. Kittredge hired her as live-in help."

I could not make my voice work.

"She slept in the little room behind this kitchen. The room had a cot and a nail for her coat."

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