Roasted chicken with lemon, rice, slivers of bell pepper she’d sliced unevenly before he’d arrived.He didn’t comment on the cut of the pepper.He picked up his fork.
“This is good.”
“You’re easy.”
“I eat what’s in front of me.”
“That’s what I mean.”
She watched him for a moment.“Your mother cooked on Sundays.”
“Pot roast.Every Sunday until I left for the Navy.Same recipe she’d gotten from her mother.Carrots, potatoes, onions, beef shoulder, a pot lid that didn’t fit right and rattled when the burner was on high.”
“Did she let you help?”
“She let me peel things.Carrots, potatoes.I wasn’t allowed near the knife until I was twelve.”
“That’s late.”
“I was the youngest of three.By the time it was my turn, she was tired.”
“Two brothers?”
“Two.Eight and ten years older.They were already in the world by the time I was old enough to ask questions about it.”
“Where are they now?”
“One in Charlotte.One in Anchorage.We talk on birthdays.Christmas if somebody remembers.”
“That’s a long way from a Sunday dinner table.”
“It’s how it shook out.”
He took a sip of wine.“I built a canoe when I was fourteen.White cedar strips over a plywood frame.Took me all summer.My dad helped with the steam bending and made me do everything else myself.”
“Did it float?”
“Barely.The hull leaked at the stern.I sealed it with marine epoxy, and it held for about two hours before the seam split open in the middle of Smith Mountain Lake.He sat on the bank and watched me paddle back with water up to my shins.”
“He didn’t come get you?”
“He said if I built it, I could figure out how to save it.He was right.I made it to shore.Soaking wet, but I made it.”He looked at the wine in his glass.“He died the next spring.Aneurysm.Forty-six.”
Maren set her fork down.“You were fifteen.”
“Fifteen.My mom went back to work full-time.I mowed lawns and stocked shelves at the hardware store on Route 220 until I was old enough to sign the papers.”
“Navy papers.”
“Navy papers.”
“Your turn,” he said.
“I played cello for six years.Quit in eleventh grade because the orchestra director told me I didn’t have the hands for it and I believed him.”
“Do you?”
“Have the hands for it?”She held up one hand.“Short fingers.Small span.He wasn’t wrong about the anatomy.He was wrong about what it meant.”
