‘I’m not throwing my life away for the three of you.’
‘I’ll find a man who can give me the life I deserve.’
You say it to their faces.
And when you’ve said it, you can have whatever you need.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
The refrigerator hummed.
Amelia, ten, who has never once seen her father standing and does not see what the big deal is, put her hand on the back of my chair.
Katherine’s mouth opened and closed.“Anything. Whatever it is.”
I looked past
her, at my daughters — one in the doorway, one on the stairs — and then back at the woman who had put a baby in my arms and picked up a suitcase.
“Sit down,” I said. “You’re going to want to be sitting for this.”
PART 2
She sat at my kitchen table.
The same table.
I’d kept it — it was the one thing I hadn’t sold, because it had been my grandmother’s and because you cannot raise two girls without a table — and Katherine sat down at it in her gray clothes and put her hands flat on the wood and looked, for a second, like a woman who remembered eating breakfast there.
