"Nothing."
"What, Easton?"
"That's how my shirt looks on you."
"I've noticed."
I held her eye a beat longer than I needed to. She rolled her eyes and went past me into the hall.
I lay there a second longer.
Then I got up and went into the kitchen.
Penny's water bowl was still by the back door.
I stood at the counter for a beat. The radiator was clicking on somewhere down the hall. The light came in flat across the floorboards where she used to lie. I crossed the kitchen, crouched, and picked the bowl up. I washed it at the sink, dried it on the dish towel, and set it on the second shelf of the cupboard over the stove. I closed the cupboard door. I stood there.
It didn't take the floor out from under me.
I could stand in this kitchen this morning and look at the empty rug. Yesterday, we'd buried her under the rose. This morning, I could look at the place she'd been and stand upright at the counter.
I put coffee on.
Astrid came down the hall in the gray shirt with her hair tied up in a small knot at the back of her head.
"I'm making you breakfast."
"You don't have to."
"I am though."
"Astrid."
"Easton."
"You don't have to feed me."
"I know I don't have to."
She got eggs out of my refrigerator without asking where they were. She found the flour in the cupboard above the stove without asking. She found the bowl my grandmother used to mixbiscuits in for fifty years and pulled it down. She didn't make a thing of any of it.
"You can make pancakes?"
She glanced at me over her shoulder, one eyebrow up. "I can make pancakes. I'm not promising they'll be good."
"Astrid."
"I'm warning you in advance."
"What do you mean?"
"I haven't made pancakes since college."
She got the milk. She measured the flour with a coffee mug. She didn't measure the baking soda. She cracked two eggs into the bowl. One of them went mostly in and partly down the side. She scooped that piece back up with a piece of the shell and gave me a look that saiddon't.
I didn't.
She heated the pan and poured the first one too thick. It set up before she could flip it, the edges going black before the middle was set. She tried to flip it anyway, and it folded over on itself. She stared at it.
