Page 30

I watch from the window as she gets out in her church coat with her purse over her arm and a foil-covered plate in her hands, and comes up the walk with Charlotte skipping beside her, the felt pumpkin tucked under one arm and a smear of white icing across her chin. I get the door open before they reach the porch.

"Hi, Mom! I did the icing. I ate the whole bottom of one." Charlotte hurtles past me into the hall. "Grandma says there's extras."

"I made extras," says my mother, and hands me the plate. It's warm. Through the foil I can smell cinnamon and butter and brown sugar, the smell of every Sunday of my childhood. Her eyes go over my face in one sweep, the way they used to go over a classroom, and she doesn't say a word about the smoke still hanging faintly in the hall. "I assume somebody was expecting one."

"Mom."

"I'll be at home." She reaches up and pats my cheek twice. She hasn't done that since the funeral. "Call me when you want to talk about it. Not before."

I watch her walk back to the Buick with her back straight, and she doesn't look around, and I love her so much in that moment that I have to lean on the doorframe.

Charlotte's in the kitchen, standing in the middle of the linoleum with her head cocked like a bird's.

"Mom."

"Yes?"

"The sink's not doing the thing."

"I know."

"It always does the thing. It's been doing the thing my whole life." She walks to the sink and puts her palm under the spout as if the faucet might be lying. Nothing. She turns and stares at me. "Who fixed it?"

"Roman."

"He fixed it? Like, fixed it fixed it?"

"Like fixed it fixed it."

"When?"

"Last night."

"Wow." She says it with a genuine, slow, nine-year-old reverence, then pulls out a kitchen chair and drops into it, swinging her legs. She unwraps the foil herself, takes a roll, and bites into it. "Where is he? Grandma said extras were for him."

"He had to go to work."

"On a Sunday?"

"It's a big week for the mill."

She chews and watches me. I've seen that look on my father's face, the look of someone deciding whether to let you off the hook. I busy myself wiping a counter that doesn't need wiping.

"Did you guys fight?"

"Charlotte."

"You've got that voice on." She licks icing off her thumb. "It's okay. I'm not gonna tell Grandma."

I turn around. My daughter sits at my kitchen table in her purple jacket with a ruined braid and sugar on her face, looking at me with her entire unflinching, nine-year-old heart, and I don't have a lie ready that I'm willing to tell her.

"He did something that hurt my feelings," I say.

"On purpose?"

"I don't know."

"Did he say sorry?"