28. Chapter 28 #2
He absorbs this. His face does the thing where he’s deciding whether to trust a piece of information his parent has given him.
Then he turns and goes down the stairs.
I follow.
He stops in the kitchen doorway. Mara is back at the counter with her mug. She lifts her hand in a small wave.
“Hi, bug.”
He crosses the kitchen, all eight years and the dinosaur and the bedhead, and he leans into her hip the way a cat leans into a leg.
She puts her hand on his head.
The kettle ticks as it cools on the stove. The kitchen settles around the two of them like it’s been waiting for this exact picture.
I stand in the doorway and watch them.
After a minute he steps back. Wipes his nose on his sleeve. Looks at her mug.
“That’s Mom’s mug. She used to have her tea in it.”
“Yes,” Mara says. Quietly.
He looks up at her.
“Dad gave it to you.”
“He did.”
He thinks about this.
“Good,” he says. Then: “I’m hungry.”
I make pancakes.
Owen sets the table. He has not been asked. He gets the plates and the forks and the syrup, and he sets three places, and he puts the blue mug at Mara’s place and the grey one at mine and the orange one with the chip on the rim at his own, and then he sits down and waits.
Mara watches him do this, her chin propped on her hand, the whole production absorbing her completely.
I cook. Two cakes at a time. The kitchen smells like butter and coffee and rain on cedar coming through the cracked window.
Owen narrates a dream about a dog the size of a horse. Mara asks questions about the dog. Owen answers each one with the seriousness of a witness on the stand.
At seven-twenty he gets up from the table without warning and runs to the den.
He comes back with a piece of paper and crayons.
He sits down at his place and starts to draw.
I bring the pancakes over. Slide three small ones onto his plate. Two onto Mara’s. Two onto mine.
Mara passes the syrup. Owen doesn’t look up. He’s drawing with the concentration he gives to things he’s trying to get right.
He labels the top of the paper in his careful block letters.
THE KITCHEN. THE FIRST MORNING.
I see it as he writes it.
I look at Mara.
She has seen it too.
She presses her mouth into her hand briefly and looks away at the window so Owen doesn’t see her face.
Owen does not look up. He keeps drawing. Three figures at a table.
The one in the middle is small. The one on the left is in a robe, holding a blue mug. The one on the right has a grey mug.
The middle one has a dinosaur sitting on the chair next to it.
He finishes. Holds it up. Considers it.
He hands it to Mara, not me.
She takes it with both hands.
“For the fridge,” he says.
“Yes,” she says.
She stands. Crosses to the fridge. Magnets it up at her eye level, not his, which means she’s putting it where she’ll see it every morning, and Owen does the small nod of satisfaction he does when a thing has been put in the right place.
He goes back to his pancakes.
After breakfast, Owen runs upstairs to put on real clothes.
Mara stands at the sink with her hands in soapy water. I bring the plates over.
There’s a photo on the wall halfway down the hall to the front door that I have walked past every day for three years.
Mara has been past it a hundred times. She has never stopped.
This morning, on the way to the porch to bring in the paper, she stops.
I’m behind her. I see her shoulders register the photo before her feet stop.
Diane at the beach. The summer before Owen was born. Laughing at something off-camera, her hand against her hair to keep it out of her face.
It’s the photo I love most. It’s the only one I have hung. There are others. They are in a box upstairs.
Mara looks at it.
I come up behind her. I put my hand on the small of her back.
We look at it together a minute.
“Cole.”
“Yeah.”
“She was beautiful.”
“She was.”
“She has Owen’s chin.”
“Owen has hers.”
“Yeah.”
A pause.
“Cole.”
“Yeah.”
“Is it okay that this is here.”
“It’s her house too. It will always be her house too.”
The door at the end of the east hall is still closed. That room is still hers. It is allowed to stay that way.
“Okay.”
“Mara.”
“Yeah.”
“She would have liked you.”
She is quiet a second.
“I would have liked her.”
“I know.”
I press my mouth to the side of her head.
We stand there another minute.
I look at the photo.
Diane laughing. She was always laughing at something. That was her. Always a beat ahead of the rest of us, always looking at the thing nobody else had found yet.
I have stood in front of this photo every day for three years and felt the weight of what was lost.
Today I feel that. And I feel Mara’s shoulder against mine, and the smell of pancakes from the kitchen, and Owen’s feet on the stairs above us, and the weight is still there but it is not the only thing.
I did not know it could be both.
I’m standing in front of this photo and it can be both.
Then Mara turns under my hand, lifts onto her toes, and kisses me. Brief. Soft.
The kind of kiss that is a placeholder for a longer conversation we’ll have over many years.
She steps back.
She tightens the belt of her robe.
She goes to get the paper from the porch.
I stay where I am a moment, my hand still warm from the small of her back, looking at the photo.
From the kitchen, Owen calls out that he’s finished his pancakes, which he finished twenty minutes ago.
From the porch, Mara’s bare feet cross the boards, and the door opens, and the morning comes in.