The Home She Built With Someone Else novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: His Mother at the Table

Nathan's POV

My mother walked into the Tornquist house on Sunday carrying a covered dish and wearing her good wool coat.

"Pierogies," she told the housekeeper. "Potato and cheese. Put them in the oven at three hundred, not a degree more."

"Yes, ma'am," the housekeeper said, and took the dish.

Margot's father stood at the end of the long hall with his hands behind him.

"Mrs. Boyle," he said.

"Sir."

"I'm told you fry a good egg."

"I fry a good everything."

"Then we'll get along," he said, and for the first time since I had met him, he smiled.

We sat down in the same long dining room.

The porch light was on, and the lake was dark beyond the lawn.

Margot sat on my left.

Her father sat at the head and my mother on his right, and Gus took his old chair with a napkin tucked into his collar.

The chair where Nigel had sat was empty, and nobody looked at it.

"Now," Margot's father said, looking around the table. "We are all at the table."

He had said it once before, to the worst possible effect.

This time my mother laughed, a bark of a laugh, and then everyone did.

The housekeeper brought the soup, and my mother tasted it, and told her it needed salt.

Margot's father tasted it and said it did.

"I've been saying that for eleven years," he told the housekeeper, who covered her smile.

Halfway through the main course, Gus tapped his glass with a fork.

"A toast," he said. "I have been waiting a long time to make one. Sit still, Margot."

"I'm sitting."

"To Nathan Boyle, who moved the stairs, and who is the best draftsman I've worked beside in thirty years. And to Margot, who gave up a chair and found out she can stand."

My mother lifted her glass.

"And to the closet," Gus said gravely, "which holds up nothing at all."

The table roared.

Margot put her face in her hand, laughing so hard her shoulders shook, and I felt her other hand find my knee under the cloth.

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