difficult, and my mother picked her favorites and made requests.
She took comfort from what I made. I made it for her. I only ate a little, depending on how much I wanted to bear on any given day. The balances inside were changing, bit by bit, on a daily basis. When her birthday rolled around, I baked her a coconut cake with cream-cheese frosting, and we sat across from each other at the table with big textured slices. Eight, whispered my cake. You still just want to go back to eight, when you didn’t know much about anything.
I set a cup of chamomile tea at her place. She thanked me, still beautiful, with fine lines sunning out now from the creases of her eyelids. We didn’t talk about Larry anymore and her constant panic over Joseph had faded a little with time, but I could still see the tightening cross her forehead when she remembered that he was not calling, that it was the call time and the phone was not ringing. Where did he go? tugging at the edges of her eyes, in the tremble of her fork, and all I could give her was that cake: half blank, half filling, full of all my own crap, and there, with bands of sunshine reaching across the table, we ate the slices together.
Your best yet, my mother sighed, licking her fork.
We ate two slices each, that afternoon. Drank more tea. To elongate the time, more than anything.
Neither of us mentioned that we had reached the dessert section of the cookbook, after which was only the index.
After the cake, we cleaned up, as usual. Rinsed the bowls. Stuck the spatula in with the silverware. She said maybe she’d make me a lemon chocolate cake next time, but I put a hand on her shoulder gently and said I didn’t really like lemon chocolate cake so much anymore.
But you used to! she said.
I used to, I said. A long time ago.
She ran the sponge along the inside of the sink, to clear it of leftover debris. She did not face me, but I could feel the vibration of tears, a kind of pain hive, rustling inside her. As she resettled the knives and forks in their dishwasher cup. As she squeezed the sponge dry. After a few minutes, she looked up, to watch out the kitchen window.
Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children.
I stood next to her, as if just listening in. Close. She said it out the window. To the flower boxes, in front of us, full of pansies and daffodils, bowing in at dusk. Where she had directed all her pleas and questions to her missing son, over the last few years. It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit. She wiped her hands on a dish towel, already moving back into the regular world, where such a thought was ridiculous, nonsensical, but I had heard it, standing there, and it was first thing she’d said in a very long time that I could take in whole.
I leaned over, and kissed her cheek.
From us both, I said.
46
On a lunch break at work, I drove over and met the woman who wore the red scarf in an old stone building off Franklin, wedged just to the east of the freeway traffic. She worked with at-risk kids, and she wrote down everything I said on a yellow pad of paper. I wanted to laugh at the officiality of it all, at how earnestly she jotted down
At work, Peter invited me on another walk. We crossed the city in zigzags.
That evening, I drove to the cafe. Madame and Monsieur were busy figuring out the latest menu plans for the restaurant, and Madame made me a quick dinner sandwich on a baguette, with pate and cornichon pickles. The piquant little cornichons, usually a little too acidic for me, were today like tiny exclamation points after the pate- Pate! Pate!
The duck? she said, squinching up her nose.
Great, I said.
Salad?
I ate a forkful of lettuce. Mmm, I said.
Is it organic?
Yes, I said.
Good. She clapped her hands. I wasn’t sure if he was telling me the truth, she said. His prices are good.
As I was finishing up, Monsieur came over from the back room with a padlock.
We want you to have a closet, he said. To store your stuff.
You will have supplies, Madame added. And you need to keep an apron here, and a change of clothes in case we go out. Downtown. Markets.
Okay, I said.
He handed the lock to me, fumbling. Along with a little pamphlet with directions.
I forget how it works, he said.
I turned the front dial.
Just pick three numbers you can remember easily, he said. Okay? Good?
I turned it in my hands. A standard padlock, with a black face and notched lines in between the numbers.
Can I put other things in the closet? I asked him, fingering the circle on the front.
Ah, he said, raising his shoulders. No matter. Whatever’s important, he said. We want you to feel at home.
I went to look in the back. The restaurant itself consisted of three rooms: the main restaurant area, with booths and tables and the wine counter, the kitchen, and a back storage section for the pantry and supplies. In that back section, they’d cleared the small closet for me. It was the size of a standard hall version, with a wooden dowel on top and a small shelf above. The doorknob supported a band of metal where I would hang the padlock. I walked to my car, setting the dial to three numbers. Nine, twelve, seventeen.
At home, at dinner, I explained to my parents that I would be working part-time at the cafe, learning about cooking in some form or another. That I would have a space to myself. I asked after all the items I wanted. Both of them nodded at me, yes. It’s not moving out yet, I told them. But it’s a step.
They helped me pack the car, together. My mother said she wanted to be the first to try the first official meal I cooked outside of the house. We’re so proud of you, Mom said, and they stood side by side as I drove away, their smiles sewn up with an edge of fishing line.
As I drove off, I honked the horn, once, and my father raised a hand.
It was easy to unload the car, at the cafe.
Inside the closet, I put my purse, a white chef’s jacket, and a box full of extra kitchen tools and books that I’d bought on my own. Grandma’s teak box of ashes. My mother’s oak jewelry box. Her apron, with twinned cherries, that she gave me as a prize after I made her a pot roast. A velvet and wicker stool that I did not want to see re- upholstered. A rolled-up poster of a waterfall. A plastic graduation tassel.
In the corner, a folding chair.
47
He returned for two weeks, that same spring I’d found him. Badly dehydrated. Skinnier than ever. With bluish skin, collapsed sheaths under the eyes. Silent, when the doctors probed and pushed.
When Mom discovered him facedown on the floor of his bedroom, it was she who called the ambulance to take
