Chapter 24: Still Choosing You

In April the ice went out of Tern Lake, and Torin built a long table.

He built it from oak, planed by hand.

He set it down the middle of my mother's cabin with eight chairs along it.

I did not ask him for it. He asked me first, and I said yes.

That was how we did things now.

On the night of the first dinner at it, I stood at the stove at five in the afternoon with flour to the elbows.

The Wellington was a good one.

The beef was seared and rested, and the mushrooms were cooked down dry.

The pastry was folded around it in a seam I had practised twice that week.

It was the same recipe as the one that went cold.

I had not wanted another one.

Then I had thought of that long table, empty at midnight, and I had wanted nothing else.

Bettina came at six with two loaves under her arm and a yellow raincoat over her head.

"It's not raining," I said.

"It might."

Hugh came behind her with a bottle in each hand and his coat on inside out.

The old woman from the lake came last, with her grey braid freshly done, and took the chair at the head of the table.

The doctor came too, to my surprise, in a clean shirt.

He held a jar of preserves and did not know how to hand it over.

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