Ten Years of Public Breakups, Then He Ran After My Bus novel · Chapter 34 of 40

Chapter 34: Hot Water

The Friday table finished the kitchen on the second Saturday in May.

It took the whole table, nine hours, two borrowed saws and one cabinet that Gordie installed upside down.

"It's modern," Gordie said.

"It's a door that opens at your knee," said the petty officer.

"It's a feature."

Linwood sat on an upturned bucket in the middle of the room in a clean flannel shirt, holding a mug and supervising.

"The level's gone off true," he said.

"The level's fine, Dad," Eben said, from the top of a ladder.

"That's an opinion."

"It's a bubble."

My mother had arrived at ten with a casserole dish in each arm, and she took over the stove with the authority of a general.

By five o'clock the plaster was up and painted, the new counters gleamed.

A white farmhouse sink sat under the east window with the bay behind it.

I stood in the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle.

It was warm and bright and smelled of paint and bread.

It was the kitchen we had torn apart one July day, laughing, with a bottle of wine going warm on the sill.

"It's done," I said.

"It's done," said Eben.

He had come down the ladder.

He stood in front of me with sawdust in his hair and paint on his forearm, and the late sun lay across the new floor.

Everyone in the room stopped talking.

Paulie, at the sink, turned off the tap.

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