Chapter 4: Kulta

Pirjo put a bowl of flour in front of me and said a Lahti woman ought to know how to braid bread.

I did, a little.

My mother had braided it on Sundays in the duplex in Lakeside, and I had stood on a chair to watch.

I didn't say so.

I floured my hands and let Pirjo talk.

She talked the way old women do when they have a great deal to say and a long time to say it.

She told me which of the old men at the Sunday table liked the end piece.

She told me the church women had raised four hundred dollars for the new roof.

She told me Stellan had not slept a full night since the day they buried the box.

"Seven winters he's carried this family," she said. "His father's heart gave out on a dock, and my boy took the chair at thirty-two."

She stopped braiding, and her eyes went soft and wet.

"And then Lauri," she said. "My baby."

I have seen a great deal of grief, and I know the real thing from the almost.

This grief was real.

What it stood in front of was something else.

I didn't say that either.

I watched her hands, which were quick and sure on the dough.

I watched where her eyes went and where they didn't.

They never went to the east window.

It was a long window over the sink with a view of the yard and the white slope of the hill.

Behind a stand of birches I could see a gray roof, and the tops of stones.

Pirjo had put her back to it.

She moved around that kitchen all morning with the window at her shoulder.

She never once let her face turn toward it.

"You've your mother's hands," she said suddenly.

"People say so," I said.

"Aili was a lovely girl, with a nurse's heart," Pirjo said. "I met her once, at the church, when you were small."