Chapter 24

Monday morning came in gray and cold.

She was up at five-thirty. She had set the coffee pot up the night before the way he had shown her—grounds measured, water filled, the timer set so that all she had to do was turn it on when she came downstairs. She turned it on. She stood at the kitchen window in the dark looking out at the yard while the coffee brewed and she thought about the day ahead.

He came down at six in the dark green flannel robe, his hair mussed, his face carrying the quality of a man who has not yet arrived at the day. He turned when he heard her and the brightening happened and she felt it land in her chest the way it always landed.

He crossed to her and kissed her—brief, warm, good morning—and went to the counter for his mug. The white one with the chip on the rim. Second cabinet to the left of the sink. She had it ready.

He sat at the kitchen table with his paper and his first cup and she sat across from him with her hands around her mug and did not speak.

The first cup was his alone.

She had known this for over a year. She had written it in her notebook in the second month of the hospice visits. The first cup is his alone. You will be present and you will be unobtrusive and you will not speak to him while he is drinking it. The first cup is when he arrives at the day. The second cup is when he arrives at you. She had said it back to Stephanie until it was native to her. Now she was living it across a kitchen table from the man it was about and the living of it was different from the knowing of it in a way she had not anticipated. The knowing had been a rule she was memorizing. The living was a marriage she was in.

He turned a page. He drank his coffee. The kitchen was quiet around them and the quiet was not empty. It was the quiet of two people who did not need to fill the space between them.

At six forty-five he set the first cup down and she poured the second and he looked up at her over the rim.

“Good morning, Kiya.”

“Good morning, Master.”

He smiled. Small. The private one.

“You remembered.”

“I have known about the first cup for fourteen months, Master.”

“How does the knowing compare to the doing.”

She thought about it honestly.

“The knowing was a rule. The doing is a marriage.”

He looked at her for a count.

“Yes,” he said. “That is exactly what it is.”

They sat with the second cup. He asked her what she planned to do with the day. She told him—the kitchen inventory, the grocery list, the laundry, the books to unpack. He listened with the quality of attention she was learning was his default when she spoke. When she had finished he nodded once.

“It is your kitchen,” he said. “Run it the way you want to run it. If you want to reorganize something, reorganize it. If you want to add something to the grocery list that is not on my list, add it. The kitchen is yours.”

“Yes, Master.”

“One thing. The spices on the second shelf from the top are in an order I have had them in for eleven years. I would prefer that order to stay.”

She smiled.

“Yes, Master.”

He finished the second cup. He stood and rinsed it at the sink and set it in the rack the way she was learning he always did. He went upstairs and she heard the shower. He came down at seven-fifteen dressed for the office—dark suit, white shirt, the charcoal overcoat from the coat tree. He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her at the table.

“I will be home by six-thirty.”

“Yes, Master.”

He came to the table and tipped her face up with two fingers under her chin and kissed her—not the brief good morning kiss but something slightly longer, a man kissing his wife before he goes to work. He let her chin go.

“Lock the front door after me.”

“Yes, Master.”

He went out. She heard the front door close. She heard his footsteps on the flagstone walk. She sat at the kitchen table for a moment and then she got up and went to the front window and watched him walk to the corner and turn and disappear.

She stood at the window for a moment after he had gone.

Then she turned back to the kitchen. Her kitchen. She put her hands on the counter and looked at it—the cabinets, the island, the six-burner range, the two windows over the sink looking out at the yard. A kitchen she had not known existed three weeks ago. A kitchen she would cook in for the rest of her life.

She opened the first cabinet.

She spent the morning learning the kitchen from the inside out.

Every cabinet. Every drawer. Every shelf. She found his system—logical, precise, the system of a man who had been running this kitchen alone for a year and had kept the system Stephanie had built. The spices on the second shelf from the top were in alphabetical order. She left them exactly as they were. The pots were arranged by size in the lower cabinet beside the stove. The baking things were in the cabinet above the refrigerator where she would need a step stool to reach them, which told her something about how often he baked, which was probably never. She made a mental note to move the baking things to a lower shelf and then remembered the spices and decided to leave everything where it was for the first month and learn the system before she changed it.

She made a grocery list. She found his list on the inside of the pantry door—a running list in his handwriting, items added as they ran low, a system Stephanie had started and he had maintained. She added three things of her own. Pierogi ingredients. A particular tea she had been drinking since the hospice months. A bunch of flowers for the kitchen table because the kitchen table needed flowers.

She did the laundry. She ran the vacuum through the downstairs rooms. She made the bed in her room—the room she still kept as her private space, the bed she no longer slept in—because Maria would come on Wednesday and the room should look like someone used it.

At eleven she went to the front room and knelt on her cushion at the right side of his chair for fifteen minutes. Not because he had told her to. Because she wanted to. The cushion was hers and the position was hers and the fifteen minutes were for her—a way of being present in the house during the hours he was away from it, a way of keeping the practice alive in his absence. Stephanie had probably done something like this. She did not know that for certain. It felt right.

She wrote in the journal-for-him at the kitchen table over lunch. She had bought the journal before she moved in—hardcover, dark green, different from the black notebook she kept for herself. She wrote the date at the top of the page and she wrote about the morning. The coffee protocol. His hand under her chin. The kitchen inventory. The spices in alphabetical order. The flowers she was going to buy. She wrote it in the voice Stephanie had told her to write it in—toward the truth, not toward a response she wanted. She wrote one sentence she crossed out because she had caught herself writing toward him. She wrote the true version instead and left it.

She closed the journal and put it on the kitchen counter where he would see it when he came home.

She went to the grocery store at two. She walked—the store was four blocks and the day had cleared to a thin cold blue—with the tote bag she had brought from her apartment and the list in her coat pocket. She bought what was on the list and the three things she had added. The pierogi ingredients. The tea. A bunch of yellow tulips because that was what the flower stand outside the store had and yellow tulips were right for a kitchen table in November.

She put the tulips in a glass vase on the kitchen table when she got home and stood back and looked at them.

Good, she thought. That is better.

She started dinner at four-thirty. A chicken, roasted simply, the way her mother had taught her. Roasted vegetables alongside. Nothing complicated. A first-week Monday dinner, something that would be ready when he came home and would be good without being a performance.

At five-fifty she set the table. His place and hers across from each other. The tulips between them.

At six-eighteen she heard his key in the lock.

She met him at the door.

She took his coat and hung it on the coat tree and he looked at her standing in his front hall at six-eighteen on a Monday evening in the way he had been looking at her since the booth—the full attention, the reading, the registering of what was there.

“You smell like roast chicken,” he said.

“Yes, Master.”

“How was your day.”

“Good, Master. Long. Quiet in a way I was not expecting.”

“Tell me later.” He put his hand against her cheek for a moment and let it drop. “Let me sit first.”

“Yes, Master.”

He went to his chair. She brought his bourbon—two fingers, neat, the way she had watched him pour it for himself on Friday evening—and set it on the table beside his chair and knelt on her cushion at his right hand.