The Half a Kitchen I Paid For

Waiting

The girls came in and hugged me and asked why the kitchen was broken. I said Grandpa was fixing it. Jill’s husband, Tom, looked at the studs and then at me, and very politely asked if there was anything he could carry.

Ten minutes later, Nick and his wife pulled in. Then Ben and his family. Then Katie.

Each one of them came in the back door and stopped in the same place. Each one looked at my side and then his. And each one, before they could say a word, got called out to the garage by Jill, who was standing at the side door in her Easter dress with her arms crossed against the cold.

So there I was. Alone in my half of a kitchen with two daughters in law, a son in law, and seven grandchildren, peeling nothing because the potatoes were already done.

The wives were kind. Ben’s wife, Amy, helped me set the table. Nick’s wife asked about my route. Nobody mentioned the wall. Tom took the little ones into the living room and put on a movie.

I looked out the window, my window, at the garage. The side door was shut. I couldn’t hear a thing. I could see the light on, and shapes moving behind the dirty glass.

I thought about Mike, and the house I walked out of with a suitcase. I thought, well, Denise, here you go again. I thought about the fifteen thousand and forty dollars and wondered if it had been the most expensive mistake of my life.

Twenty five minutes. That’s how long they were out there. I know because I watched the clock on my new range hood the whole time.

What Jill Said

They came back in together. All four of them, and Rod last.

Rod’s eyes were red. So were Katie’s. Ben had his hand on his father’s shoulder, the way you’d steady a man on ice.

Jill came and stood right across from me, on her father’s side of the room, in the bare half. She put her hand on one of the bare studs, the same one Rod had touched in February.

“Denise,” she said. “I need to tell you something about my mother.”

I put my dish towel down.

“Mom made Dad promise about the house because of her own mother,” Jill said. “When Grandpa Lindgren died, his second wife sold the farm out from under Mom and her sisters in about six months. Mom was nineteen. She never got over it.”

I hadn’t known that. Rod had never told me.

“So when she was dying, she made Dad promise,” Jill went on. “So no stranger could ever put us out of the house we grew up in. That’s all it was. She was scared.”

Her voice caught. She waited until it was steady.

“She didn’t know it would be you,” Jill said. “She didn’t know you’d be the one who put the windows in. She didn’t know you’d be the one Dad called from the truck in February and couldn’t say a word to. She wasn’t trying to put anybody out. Least of all somebody who took care of him.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there with my hands on my counter.

“Mom would have hated this kitchen,” Jill said, and for the first time, she smiled a little. “Not your half. His. She’d have had him fixed before the coffee was done.”