Chapter 22: Sunday Supper

Dalton's mother was in Annette's kitchen with her sleeves rolled up and a potato in each hand.

"I've never peeled one," she said, when I came in from the porch with Shane behind me. "I am told there's a technique."

"Hold it like this," Annette said, and took her wrist. "Peeler toward your thumb, not away."

"Away seems more natural."

"Away is how people lose fingers."

I stopped in the doorway and just looked.

This was a woman who had spent ten years sending me engraved cards.

She had a smear of flour on her cheek and no lipstick again, and she looked ten years younger.

"Holly," she said. "Hello, dear. I've taken the spare room. Annette was kind enough not to ask me why."

"She asked three times," Annette said. "You didn't hear me."

Stephanie came in with a stack of plates.

"The couch is mine," she said happily. "I voted."

"The couch has a spring in it," Dalton's mother said.

"It's my spring."

Shane took the potatoes away from both of them.

"Sit," he said. "I'll do these."

We ate at six on the long porch table with the lake going copper behind the trees.

There was pot roast, and burnt rolls that Dalton's mother had made herself and insisted everyone eat.

"They're delicious," Shane said, with a straight face.

"They are charcoal."

"They're delicious charcoal."

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