Chapter 12: The Church Kitchen

The church kitchen on the afternoon of the Harvest Supper smelled of boiled potatoes and floor wax.

I had signed up for the back counter, the one nobody wanted, beside the walk-in cooler and the chipped enamel sink.

I stood there with a rolling pin, a hot griddle and a bowl of dough I had riced and chilled the night before.

Lasse had offered to help, and I had told him lefse was a one-woman job.

He had left a thermos of coffee on the step.

At two o'clock the back door opened, and Brynja came in with her hood up.

"The Guild let me in," she said.

"The oldest one at the door said that if I was going to stand in the kitchen, I was to stand in the kitchen."

"She's a saint," I said.

"She told me I looked thin."

I kept rolling.

Brynja crossed the floor and set her purse on a stool.

She did not touch the counter.

"Can I tell you now?" she said.

I thought about the girl with the loud laugh who had cut my bangs in sixth grade and cried over them.

I thought about the white dress on a pier.

I put down the rolling pin.

"Say it," I said. "All of it. And don't tell me what you felt."

She told it plainly.

She said that in June she had known for two weeks that she was pregnant.

She had told Eirik in his truck behind the fire station.

He had gone white, and said he would think.

The next day Birgit Lindholm had arrived at Brynja's apartment with a coffee cake.

"She sat on my couch," Brynja said, "and she took my hand. And she said, Dear, of course this is happening."

"It happens in the best families."

She shook her head at the memory.

"She knew about the baby," I said.

"She knew about you and Eirik too. She said she'd always thought you were too stiff for him."

I felt the old blow land, and I let it.

"She said Eirik would marry the mother of his child," Brynja said.

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