Chapter 23: The Table

The divorce decree came in December, in a plain envelope, and I read it standing up in my own kitchen.

I had closed on the brick two-flat the week before.

On the first Saturday in January, I turned the oven on in that kitchen for the first time.

I had not baked anything since we moved to Chicago.

For two years, I had told myself that it was a job I used to have.

My hands remembered it before I did.

I creamed the butter, and I zested the lemons, and I rolled out the shells for tiny tarts, with the window over the sink full of weak winter light.

By five, the whole house smelled of sugar.

The doorbell rang at six, and it was Kat, who had never once in her life arrived on time.

She came in with a bottle of wine under each arm and her coat still on, and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen.

"It smells like a bakery in here," she said. "It smells like a better bakery than a bakery."

"They're not out yet."

"I will wait with dignity," Kat said, and ate one from the cooling rack.

Monique came next, in a navy coat, with a bag of oranges.

She had resigned from Lakeshore on the Monday after the dinner, and she was working now for a small firm on the north side.

"My new boss is a woman," she said. "She has asked me three times how I'm feeling. I'm not used to it."

"That's what a good boss does," I said.

"It's unsettling."

She hugged me hard, quickly, and let go, and I understood that this was what we were going to be, and that it was enough.

My lawyer, Kat's sister-in-law, arrived last, carrying a cake box she had clearly bought from someone else.

"Don't tell her," she told Kat.

"I can see the label," I said.

The last knock was a different knock, two raps and a pause.

I opened the door.

Wyatt stood on my step in his flannel shirt, with sawdust on his shoulders.

He had a blanket over something large and flat, and the truck was behind him at the curb with its tailgate down.

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