Chapter 19: Rice and Gravy

The Brookline house was dark when we pulled up, and the porch light I always left on was out.

"Somebody cut your electric?" Rémy said.

"Bulb," I said. "Preston always changed it."

I heard how that sounded as soon as I said it, and he let it go by.

He carried the pot in through the kitchen door with both arms.

It was Mawmaw's pot. I knew it before he set it down.

The iron was ridged along the rim where her thumb had gone for fifty years.

"Where did you get that?" I said.

"Your cousin in Breaux Bridge. Mireille took her number off your phone on the ferry, and she mailed it up. It came Wednesday."

"She had no right."

"No," Rémy agreed. "She's a pest. I like her."

I laughed. It came out of me without asking.

He took off his jacket and hung it on a chair, and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

The flour had gone from his forearms, but I still looked for it.

"Sit," he said. "You haven't eaten since breakfast."

"I'm not a child."

"I know what you are," he said, easily, and lit the stove.

I sat at my own kitchen table and watched another person cook in my kitchen for the first time in eight years.

He didn't ask where anything was. He opened three cabinets and found the onions, the rice, and the heavy knife.

He chopped the onions fast and fine, with the tip of the blade on the board.

The smell came up, sweet and sharp, and I put my hand over my eyes and found I was crying.

"It's the onions," I said.

"Mais oui," he said, kindly, and did not turn around.

He made rice and gravy, the plain kind, with a little pork and a lot of black pepper.

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