Chapter 23: The Kitchen

The key to my father's study stuck, and my mother put her hand over mine to turn it.

The door opened on dust and afternoon light.

Everything was where he had left it.

The leather chair, the drafting table, the stack of blueprints with his glasses folded on top.

Ellen walked in first and touched the back of the chair.

"I couldn't come in here for years," she said. "Harlan wanted to turn it into a gym."

"Over my dead body."

"That was nearly the arrangement."

She laughed, and I laughed, and she opened the top drawer of the desk.

Inside lay a rolled sheet of drawing paper tied with kitchen string.

She slid off the string and spread the page across the table.

It was a floor plan, in my father's square hand, for a house with a long porch.

One bedroom had a window seat, and under it he had written: Margo's. She'll read here.

I put my fingers on the pencil lines.

"He drew this the year I was born," I said.

"He drew it every year," Ellen said. "He kept adding rooms."

I stood there with my mother's arm around my waist, and for a while neither of us said anything.

"Dinner," she said at last, wiping her face. "I'm going to cook. I've eaten off a hospital tray for nine months."

"You'll sit."

"I'll stir."

By six the kitchen on Linden Road smelled of garlic and browning butter.

Hoyt had come from the shop with a bag of groceries and his father's old cast-iron pan.

My mother stood at the stove in an apron, giving orders with a wooden spoon.

Hoyt chopped onions where he was told, at the counter, and wept very quietly at the board.

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