Chapter Five #2
I kept my elbows close to my sides. The kitchen was wide but not wide enough for the number of women moving through it -- three, maybe four, plus Kitty at her station and me at the sink.
They drifted in and out of my peripheral vision like weather systems. Lavinia reached past my shoulder for a wooden spoon, her blond braid swinging loose down her back, her forearm brushing my sleeve without apology.
Katherine -- the same one who’d sat on my stoop yesterday talking about the herb garden -- stood at the island tasting a sauce from a small pot, her face tilted toward the ceiling as she considered.
“Needs salt,” she said to no one in particular.
“It always needs salt with you,” Lavinia called back. “Your taste buds died in ‘92.”
“Your cooking died in the womb,” Katherine shot back.
They laughed. The sound bounced off the tile and the stainless steel and the low ceiling, layering into a sound that felt less like conversation and more like the ambient noise of a place where people had stopped performing for each other a long time ago.
Raven stood at the far end of the counter, apart from the noise, methodically portioning coleslaw into a row of mason jars with the kind of precision that looked less like cooking and more like a task she’d assigned herself to keep her hands busy.
She didn’t join the banter, didn’t look up when Lavinia and Katherine traded insults, but something in the set of her shoulders eased when the laughter rose, like she was tracking it without needing to be part of it.
When she caught me watching, she offered a small, economical smile -- not unfriendly, just careful, the smile of someone who’d learned to hold a little of herself back before deciding a room was safe.
Kitty worked her station with the efficiency of someone running a restaurant during the dinner rush. Skillet to sheet pan, sheet pan to oven, oven to cooling rack, cooling rack to serving tray. Her hands never stopped moving. Neither did her mouth.
“Where you from originally, Katy?”
The question landed between the second and third onion. Casual. Thrown over her shoulder while she shook a sizzling pan.
“Indiana, originally.” I kept my eyes on the board. Knife through onion, knife through onion. “Moved around a bit after that.”
“Ellie like animals? She was eyeballing that lab mix yesterday like she wanted to take it home in her pocket,” Kitty asked.
“Yes. Loves them. We had a cat in our last place, but…” I caught myself.
Swallowed the rest of the sentence. The escaped cat that had been left behind, along with the plants and the bookshelf and the framed photo of Ellie’s first birthday that wouldn’t fit in the SUV. “She’s good with animals. Gentle.”
“What do you do? For work,” Kitty asked.
“Medical billing. Remote. I have a laptop.” The knife moved. Onion gave way beneath it in neat, damp cubes. “I can work from anywhere with Internet.”
Kitty nodded. That was it. No follow-up about why we’d moved around or where the cat went or what kind of medical billing or whether the laptop was in the SUV with the shot bearings.
She just absorbed the answers and moved on, the same way she moved between the skillet and the sheet pan -- smooth, untroubled, each task flowing into the next without ceremony.
The fourth onion was giving me trouble. The layers had started to separate, and my cuts were coming out uneven.
I adjusted my grip on the knife, set the flat of my palm against the onion’s curve to hold it steady, and went slower.
Lavinia appeared at my elbow again, reaching past me for a colander hanging from a hook above the sink.
Her hip bumped mine -- not hard, not deliberate, just the casual collision of bodies in a narrow kitchen -- and she didn’t apologize.
Instead, she paused, colander in hand, and looked down at my cutting board.
“You chop like you mean it,” she said. “Good.”
I laughed. It came out before I could catch it -- short, startled, a single exhale that sounded more genuine than anything my mouth had produced in weeks. The sound hung in the steam for half a second, then dissolved into the general noise of the kitchen. I felt my face warm. Not from the heat.
Lavinia nodded once, satisfied, and carried her colander back to the sink on the far wall.
I returned to the onions. Knife through flesh.
Blade on board. The rhythm found me again, and my shoulders -- which had been riding somewhere near my earlobes since I walked through the door -- dropped.
A half-inch. Maybe less. Enough that I felt the difference in the muscles along my upper back, a subtle release like a cord being slackened one turn at a time.
Kitty slid a bowl of potatoes in front of me when the onions were done. Red ones, skins on. “Cubes,” she said. “Same size as the onions, or close enough. Doesn’t have to be perfect. They’re going in a stew that nobody’s going to photograph.”
I took the bowl. Set the first potato on the board.
Reached for the knife I’d set down seconds ago, and realized with a small, distant shock that my hand had found the handle without looking for it.
Muscle memory. The kind that lives in your fingers when your brain is too busy worrying to pay attention.
The exhaust fan ground. The burners roared.
Women moved around me with the easy certainty of people who belonged exactly where they were standing, and I stood among them with potato juice on my knuckles and a knife in my hand and the quiet realization, arriving beneath the noise, that I had not once looked at the door.
An hour. Maybe more. The light through the high windows had shifted from midday gold to the softer amber of late afternoon, and I was still here, elbow-deep in root vegetables, and the door might as well have been painted on the wall for all the attention I’d paid it.
Kitty lifted the lid on a pot and steam billowed toward the ceiling in a thick white plume.
The smell hit me -- rich, meaty, complex with herbs I couldn’t name -- and my stomach turned over once, hard, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and that I hadn’t thought about what to make for dinner yet.
“You’re almost through those,” Kitty said, nodding at the few potatoes left in my pile. “Finish up, then go find your kid before she adopts somebody else’s dog.”
I nodded and kept chopping. There was something reassuring about the simple work, about having nothing more complicated to worry about than finishing the pile in front of me. Somewhere along the way, the tension I’d been carrying since we hit the road had started to ease.
The women talked around me. I listened. Didn’t join. But my shoulders stayed where they’d fallen -- down that half-inch, maybe a full inch now -- and the knife kept moving, and the door stayed where it was, and for one solid hour in a hot, loud kitchen full of strangers, I’d forgotten to be afraid.
My phone buzzed once in my pocket while I dried my hands.
Unknown number. An area code from three states back -- one I recognized without wanting to.
I let it ring out. When I checked it twenty minutes later there was no voicemail.
Just a missed call and the small, cold understanding that an hour without fear wasn’t the same thing as an hour without him.
* * *
The townhome was quiet when I pushed through the screen door.
Not empty-quiet. The quiet a space has when a child has been moving through it recently -- shoes kicked off by the entryway, a dish towel crumpled on the counter instead of folded, the faint smell of apple juice lingering in the air.
Ellie sat at the kitchen table with her back to me, both elbows on the wood, a sheet of printer paper flattened under her palms. Her shoulders were hunched in concentration, same as they got when she was drawing a picture that mattered.
Her hair had been braided -- not by me. Someone with more patience for small, fine motor tasks had woven the light brown waves into a single plait that hung between her shoulder blades, neat and tight from crown to end.
Colored pencils were spread across the table in a half-circle.
Twenty-four of them, maybe more, arranged by hue from red to purple with the precision of someone who took color seriously.
They hadn’t been there this morning. I would have noticed.
The townhome had come with a sofa, a coffee table, a television, dishes in the cabinet, towels in the closet.
Not art supplies. Not twenty-four colored pencils in a cardboard box with the price sticker still on the bottom, placed on a kitchen table where a seven-year-old would find them the moment she walked through the door.
Ellie didn’t look up. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hey, baby.” My palm was raw from the knife handle, the skin at the base of my thumb reddened from gripping too hard for too long. “What are you drawing?”
“My rocks. For Harlow.” She held up the page. “But I’m making them look like what their names mean. This one’s Gate.”
I moved to the refrigerator. Dinner. I needed to figure out dinner.
The thought of reheating something from a can made my stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
I’d make dinner. Pasta, maybe. There was butter in the fridge.
Bread. The basics stocked before we arrived, arranged on the shelves with the quiet thoroughness of someone who understood that feeding people was not a negotiation.
I pulled the door open. Cold air rushed out, carrying the clean, neutral smell of a refrigerator that had been running empty until recently. I reached for the butter dish on the top shelf and stopped.