Page 13 of Working for Keeps

“Six days.”

“Yes.”

She holds that a moment longer. Then she turns and walks back into the house, leaving the door open. In my family that’s what forgiveness looks like.

The smell hits me before my coat is off. Chicken, bay leaf, vinegar, pepper, garlic gone soft and sweet in the pan. Adobo. She’s been cooking since before I got up.

“Sit. You’re thin,” she says as she spoons white rice in a bowl and tops it with chicken adobo. “The city makes you thin and you think that’s the same as doing well.”

She puts a bowl in front of me and stands over me until I pick up the spoon. Only then does she sit down across from me and fold her hands.

“So. They sent you to close the plant.”

“They sent me to do an audit.”

She gives me that look again. “Vera.”

I put the spoon down. “They sent me to find a way to cut labor costs, yes.”

“Mm.” She nods slowly, as if I’ve confirmed the weather. “And you’re staying in that duplex on Elm Street with the bad furnace.”

“It’s fine.”

“It has a bad furnace. It’s always had a bad furnace.”

Behind her, on the windowsill, is the same row of things that’s been there my whole life. A jar of dried bay leaves. A chipped ceramic bird. A photograph of my mother at twenty-six in front of a Quonset hut in a yellow dress, squinting, one hand up against the sun.

And on the counter under the window, the tin. Battered, red, with a lid that never fit right. My mother’s recipe cards.

“Nana. Why didn’t you tell me about the tab at Kincaid’s?”

Her hands don’t move, not one finger of them.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Six hundred dollars. A year of deliveries you stopped taking. The heating bills. The roof.”

“The roof was county maintenance.”

“The county doesn’t do roofs.”

“The county,” she says with enormous dignity, “does what the county does.”

“Nana…”

“He asked me not to tell you,” she says to the table. “Michael. And I let him think I didn’t know he was doing it, because letting a man think he’s gotten away with something is how you keep him doing it.” Her mouth twitches. “He is not a subtle boy. He came to fix a step that wasn’t broken.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Because you were building something.” She looks up. “Because you called every Sunday, and every Sunday you sounded like a woman about to ask if I needed anything, and I was not going to be the anchor that pulled you back down into this valley. I raised two girls in this house who were never allowed to be a burden to anybody. I was not going to start being one at eighty.”

My throat closes. “I would have come.”

“I know,” she says. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.”

The clock over the stove ticks.

“Reyna knows,” I say. It isn’t a question. My sister has been in Denver four years, and she and I haven’t had a conversation longer than eleven minutes since our father’s funeral.