I started laughing.
It came up out of me in a way nothing had in two days. It wasn't a polite laugh. It was the real one, the Queens one. I hadn't heard myself make it since before Penny had gone bad.
Astrid stared at me with the spatula in her hand.
"I'm glad my failure is amusing to you."
"Astrid. I'm so sorry. Truly."
"Are you?"
"I'll eat it."
"You absolutely will not."
"I will."
I came over, lifted the burned folded pancake out of the pan with my fingers, and put it on a plate. I ate the corner of it standing at the counter.
It tasted like a pancake somebody had set on fire on purpose.
"It's good."
"Liar."
"It's good, Astrid."
She started laughing then, too. It had a little water in it. I ate half of the bad one. She made me a second one that wasn't black on the bottom. We sat at the kitchen table and ate off the same plate.
She drank her coffee with her elbows on the table and her hair coming loose from its knot. She told me she was going to need to pick up the cat ointment from the pharmacy on Main Tuesday. She told me Moose had probably gotten into the trash, and she was already prepared to find it on the floor when she walked in. She told me she had a contractor coming Tuesday for a punch list item.
I sat across the table from her in my grandmother's kitchen at seven in the morning and listened to her tell me the small ordinary shape of her week.
I'd never sat across this table from a person who did that. My grandmother had been the only one before. The women I'd known hadn't sat at this table. None of them. Astrid was here, and she wasn't family, and she wasn't crew. Those were the only two kinds of staying I'd ever known.
She'd chosen me.
Astrid noticed me looking.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Easton."
"Nothing, Astrid."
She didn't push. She finished her coffee. She stood up.
"I have to go feed Moose."
"Yeah."
"And the cat. He gets the wet food twice a day until I have him at a better weight."
"Did you name him yet?"
"Not yet."
