Chapter 27: In Her Place

By Christmas the baby had found her lungs and her opinions, and she had a strong one about being set down anywhere that wasn’t a person, so I cooked the whole dinner with Robin Claire strapped to my front in a wrap and her fists working against my collarbone. I did it in my mother’s kitchen, in an apron that had been my mother’s, at a stove my mother had stood at, and there wasn’t a soul left on the earth to tell me I hadn’t been born to it.

I was seventeen. Two months a mother. And I stood at that stove basting a bird I’d brined the way Claire used to and pinching the herbs back the way nobody’d ever had to teach me, and I ran the whole day the way I’d watched two women run it before me, and I ran it easy. That was the part that should have scared me, if I’d let it — how easy it came. How far I’d gone from being the girl in that house things got done to, and how completely I’d become the one the whole house turned around.

And Dad could not keep his hands off me the whole morning. He was meant to be minding the fire and the folding chairs, and instead he kept drifting back into the kitchen and to me — a hand on my hip going by, his mouth at the nape of my neck at the counter, once his whole weight up warm against my back and both hands gone low under the apron, till I laughed and elbowed him off because we had an hour and not a day.

Two months out from the baby I’d come nearly all the way back to myself. The nursery keeps me lean and hard through the arms and the back, hauling flats dark to dark, and what little the baby had left on me, he liked, and said so with his hands.

Whatever else that year had made of the two of us, it never once made us tired of each other. If anything it ran the other way — he wanted me the same as he had down in the dark a year before, only up in the daylight now, in our own bed every night of the week, with no name in his mouth when he reached for me but mine.

Claire wasn’t there. She’d sent a box, though — it came the week before, a soft knit thing for the baby in a green that was going to be right on her, and a card with only Robin Claire written on the front in Claire’s small careful hand and nothing at all inside it, because there’s nothing you can put in a card that would hold what was folded up in that name for the two of us. Her chair — she’d had a chair at that table for years — I stood it against the wall and didn’t lay a plate at it, and Dad watched me do it and said nothing, and that was Claire, handled, the only way any of us had ever learned how.

Ravi and Priya came at four with the snow just starting, and I knew before they’d got their coats off that what I’d watched start in the grass on the Fourth of July had gone the whole way while I wasn’t looking.

You’d have had to know them the way I knew them to catch it. To anybody else it was a man and his girl come to Christmas dinner, easy with each other the way you’d want a father and daughter to be. But I’d sat at a Thanksgiving table a year and some ago and watched Ravi go grey in the face rather than let his eyes land on his own daughter, watched his hand hover an inch off her shoulder and not be able to come down.

And here he was in my front hall lifting her coat off her from behind, his hands seeing to it before she’d asked, and here she was letting him, tipping back into him half a degree, the way you lean into a thing that’s yours to lean on. Neither of them thinking about it. That was the whole tell. A year ago every inch of air between the two of them had been a live wire. Now they moved around each other like people who’d worked a thing all the way out and stopped having to watch their own hands.

And when he’d got the coat off her I saw what she’d worn under it, and it stopped me half a beat. A dark skirt that held close to her hips and the tops of her thighs, the way a girl wears a thing she means to be looked at in; a soft sweater she filled out now the way the flat, fearless kid off the high board never had; her hair down and brushed to a shine, a red on her mouth she’d never once have bothered with a year ago. Seventeen, and wearing it now like she’d only lately learned what it was for — hips and mouth and the whole of her — and she had not put herself together like that for the turkey. I knew exactly who she’d done it for.

He was standing right behind her with her coat folded over his arm, and I watched his eyes go the length of her once, quick and easy and proprietary, a man taking stock of a thing that was his to take stock of, and come back up before a soul in that house but me would ever have caught them going.

Priya found me in the kitchen while the men talked, the way she’d found me in a hundred kitchens since we were four. She lifted the baby off my front so I could get down to the potatoes, and she was good with her — better than good. Easy. Natural, the way I was still learning to be. She had Robin Claire quiet against her shoulder inside a minute, one hand spread the whole width of the little back, swaying without any idea she was doing it.