The Payment Book Beside the Pie

The dish towel

I started clearing plates around six, when it was full dark outside. That is my job on holidays and I like it.

There is something about the hot water and the suds that settles me down.

I had my arms in the sink up to the elbow when I heard somebody come into the kitchen behind me. I thought it was Steve, coming for more coffee. But it was Brittany.

She stood by the refrigerator for a minute with the payment book still in her hand.

Then she set it down on the counter, very gently, and picked up a dish towel off the oven handle.

She took the first plate out of the rack and started drying it. She did not ask where it went. She watched where I reached and figured it out.

In fourteen years, Brittany had never once dried a dish in my kitchen. She had never once come into the kitchen at all, except to get ice.

I did not say anything about that. I just handed her the next plate.

We worked for a while without talking. A plate, a bowl, the big serving spoon, the gravy boat.

The window over the sink was black and I could see both our faces in it, side by side.

“Mom told me,” she said finally. She was looking at the bowl in her hands, not at me. “When I was nineteen. The week you and Dad got married. She sat me down at her kitchen table in Fort Wayne and said you’d seen the house and the retirement and that was all you saw.”

“I know,” I said.

“I believed her.” She put the bowl in the cupboard. “Every time I came over and saw something new, I believed her a little more. The counters. The furnace. I told Chad you were spending my inheritance. I said it to my friends.”

I rinsed a glass and handed it to her. “Your mom was hurting,” I said. “People say things when they’re hurting. I’m not going to stand here in my kitchen and say anything bad about her.”

She was quiet. Then she said, “You could. You’d have the right.”

“I could,” I said. “But she’s Harper’s grandma too.”

That was when she started crying. Not loud. Just tears coming down while she kept on drying the same glass around and around.

I turned off the water and dried my hands and I did not know what to do, so I just stood next to her.

“I’m sorry, Val,” she said. “I’m so sorry. You paid for his house for twelve years and I sat at your table and called you a thief in front of my daughter.”

“You didn’t know,” I said.