Chapter 23: Dot's Table

Dot made a pot roast the next Sunday, and she did not ask whether anyone was hungry.

She set the long table in her cottage with four mismatched plates.

In the middle sat a bowl of green beans the size of a hubcap.

"Sit," she said. "Everybody. Anson, the carving fork is yours. Don't make a face. It's a fork."

I sat at the head of the table, because Dot pointed.

Anson sat on my right.

Tilda stood in the doorway holding a pie, with her bandaged hand still wrapped in white.

"Where do I go?" she asked.

Dot looked at me.

I looked at the far end of the table, the last chair, the one next to the draft from the door.

"There," I said.

Tilda nodded.

She set the pie on the sideboard and sat down in the draft.

Dot laid a spoon beside my plate.

It was steel.

It was heavy, with tiny roses on the handle.

My mother would have called it a hazard.

I picked it up.

The weight of it surprised me.

I held it in my left hand, over the line across my palm, and the room went quiet.

"Nobody makes a speech," Dot said. "Eat the roast."

I took a spoonful of gravy.

It tasted like salt, and flour, and a woman who had been scared for me for three years.

I put the spoon down, because my hand had started to shake.

Anson did not reach for me.

He put his own hand flat on the table beside mine, palm up.

I laid my fingers across it, and Dot cleared her throat loudly and started passing the beans.

We ate.

It was the first meal I had finished in that cottage without anyone watching my plate.

Halfway through, Tilda put her fork down.

"Jo."

"Yes."

"May I ask what you need? From me. I don't mean to be forgiven. I mean what I have to do."

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