Chapter 24: Her Terms

Six weeks later, Dot's kitchen smelled of pot roast and baby powder.

The long table was set for six.

Linnea sat on one side with her daughter asleep on her shoulder, humming something with a slow bow in it.

The nurse had stayed on as Dot's housemate.

She sat next to Linnea with her white shoes off for the first time in thirty years.

Dot stood at the stove with a wooden spoon and the look of a woman running a courtroom.

I sat at the head of the table with my daughter in the crook of my arm.

She had gained a pound and a half.

The free clinic would have been very pleased.

Jerome came in from the porch with an armload of firewood, and snow on his shoulders.

He set it down by the stove, and Dot pointed at the mat with her spoon, and he wiped his boots without being asked.

"He's trainable," Dot said. "I'll give you that."

"Dot," I said.

"I'm only saying."

Linnea laughed into her daughter's hair.

Jerome sat down across from me.

He did not look at me quite directly.

For six weeks he had slept on my floor under the quilt.

He got up at five to feed the baby before I woke.

Not once had he said the word again.

He had kept his promise to wait.

"Everybody eat," said Dot. "This isn't a funeral."

We ate.

It was the loudest, warmest meal I had ever sat at.

Linnea told the story of Tate's lawyer trying to fax her a threat on a machine that had been unplugged since 1994.

The nurse described, in clinical detail, what she had put in the sugar tablets.

Jerome laughed so hard he had to put his fork down.

When the plates were cleared, Dot set a single sheet of paper in front of me and a pen.

It was her recipe paper again.

"Terms," she said. "I'm told those are in order."

I looked at the blank page.

Then I wrote.

I wrote it slowly, in my transcriber's printing, and everyone waited.

When I finished, I slid it across the table to Jerome.

He read it aloud, in a voice that wasn't steady.

"One. The truth, every day, even when it's small."

"Two. My name stays Fenn, and so does hers."

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