Chapter 9 #2
Auntie Rhonda’s kitchen had not been renovated since 1987 and had no intention of starting now. The linoleum was original. The stove had a personality she respected more than most people. When the oven door squeaked, she treated it like information instead of a problem.
I stood at the sink cleaning collards while she worked the pot with smoked turkey necks, because smoked gave the greens the depth she insisted was not preference but necessity, and I stripped stems without being told.
“Not the apple cider,” she said when I reached for the vinegar. “The good one. Behind the cooking sherry Jerome has been visiting since Labor Day weekend.”
“Jerome steals your cooking sherry.”
“Jerome believes anything in a closed cabinet in a locked house is community property if he has a key.” She stirred the pot without looking at me.
“He came by the other day to drop off the oil for frying the turkey and noticed I had measured the bottle. When I asked him where did four ounces go because it was practically a new bottle, he looked me in the face and said that must have been evaporation.”
I handed her the vinegar, laughing. “Evaporation.”
“I said, Jerome, sherry does not evaporate four tablespoons at a time in a sealed bottle.” A pause. “He said he’d look into it.” Another pause. “And we know he will not look into it.”
“Of course he won’t.”
“But we both know I know.” She adjusted the heat. “Some things work better when nobody says them out loud.”
She said it to the pot like it was part of the recipe.
“Are you laughing?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
“Good. Strip faster.”
So I did.
Miss Lorraine arrived first, as she always did, with her pie still warm and her coat on like she had not yet decided whether she was staying or just passing through, even though she had been part of this table longer than most of us had been alive.
She took her seat, picked up the green beans, and began snapping them with the quiet authority of someone who did not need to announce herself to be fully present.
By noon, the house filled the way it always did, without coordination but with perfect timing.
Jerome came in midstory like the room had been waiting for him to finish a sentence he had started somewhere else.
Marcus appeared exactly when the food was ready and denied any connection between those two facts with the confidence of a man who had rehearsed that denial for years.
Simone brought wine and rolls. Someone turned music on low and the table in Auntie Rhonda’s dining room built itself out of habit.
Deion came through the kitchen door with a dessert box balanced in one hand and a bag looped at his wrist after letting himself in like he had done it enough times not to need announcing but not so often that it had turned into routine.
“You cutting it close,” Jerome said from the table.
“I brought something,” Deion replied, lifting the box slightly.
“That don’t clear you,” Marcus added.
“Depends what it is,” Auntie Rhonda said, already moving toward him.
He smiled at that, but it landed a half beat late, like he had to catch up to the moment before stepping into it. If anyone else noticed, they didn’t show it. He greeted Auntie Rhonda first, kissed her cheek, handed over the box, then turned to me.
The kiss he gave me was the same one he had always given me. It was quick, familiar and friendly. Nothing anyone would look at twice, but it stayed with me anyway.
He moved past me into the room, seating himself at the table like he had always been part of it, picking up a thread of conversation without asking where it started. From the outside, nothing about it was different.
I sat down a minute later, aware of something I couldn’t quite name, like a note just slightly off key in a song I knew too well to ignore.
He was wearing the navy henley with the faint paint transfer at the cuff from the day he’d helped me paint and hang shelves in the downstairs powder room, a detail I had cataloged without meaning to, the way I had cataloged a dozen other things about him over the years without ever asking myself why I knew them. But I was asking now.
Jerome gave the blessing, because Jerome always gave the blessing, and he did it with an ease that nobody in the family commented on out loud because it would only encourage him. At the place where he always paused, he did, taking two beats to do so.
He never named it. He never explained it. He also never needed to. That was where my mother lived at this table now, and everyone seated at the table understood.
“Amen,” we said together with a hint of reflection in my mother’s memory as an undertone.
Plates started to get filled and the conversation picked up where it had left off last time, as if no time had passed between then and now.
Marcus told a story about a patient who had shown up to physical therapy in full basketball gear and attempted to demonstrate his recovery with an imaginary crossover, which ended exactly the way it sounded like it would.
Jerome said this was predictable. Marcus said Jerome acted like he didn’t sprain a muscle just by driving past a gym.
I was laughing when Deion’s hand found mine under the table.
He did not look at me, because he was still in the conversation following Marcus, still present with everyone else.
However, his hand closed around mine like it had done before, like it had always done, the quiet check-in between two people who knew each other well enough to notice shifts without naming them.
Except today I held on. I held on a little longer than I needed to. Long enough for him to know I was choosing it.
I kept my eyes on my plate as I did, aware of everything at once in a way that felt both too sharp and not sharp enough. The abundance of comfort foods. The way this room had always made space for me without asking me to explain myself. And still.
I let that extra second happen. It cost nothing, and at the same time, it cost everything, because I knew what I was doing. And I knew why.
Deion let go first, passing a dish across the table like nothing had happened, as if everything was exactly the same. I watched him do it and I put the feeling that followed somewhere I would not have to deal with it immediately. That place was getting crowded.
After dessert, I followed Auntie Rhonda into the kitchen with a stack of plates. Miss Lorraine came in behind me with an empty pan, so my guess was that she had something to say and had chosen her moment.
“Your mother used to look at your father like that,” she said, running water over the dish without looking up. “Before she said anything about it.”
I kept my hands in the sink.
“She told me I was wrong,” she went on. “Said I was reading too much into it.”
She rinsed the plate, unhurried.
“Didn’t make me wrong.”
I didn’t answer.
“Some things don’t ask permission to be real,” she added, setting the dish aside.
I stayed where I was, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go with that.
“Just something I noticed,” she said, already turning back toward the table.