Eleanor had been the one to write down what she saw, the day Mark brought the papers. She had been the one to get it notarized without being asked twice. I looked at her now, bustling around my mother's kitchen like she owned it, and I thought about how the whole case — the whole house, really — had rested on people like Eleanor: neighbors who paid attention and told the truth when it mattered. Without her written statement, Ellen Cho would have had a much thinner file. Without her, Margaret might never have known what she'd signed until it was too late to do anything about it.
"You're staring," Eleanor said, catching me.
"I'm grateful," I said.
"Well." She turned back to the stove, but not before I saw her smile. "Gratitude is best expressed in pie. Fortunately, Tina has that covered."
Josh arrived at noon with Tina, carrying the pies like they were newborns. Tina went straight to Margaret and hugged her, and Margaret hugged her back, and I saw Tina's shoulders drop about an inch, the way they always did when she realized she was welcome. Mark was not with them.
"He's coming," Tina said, catching my look. "He went to get ice. He'll be here."
I nodded. I did not say what I was thinking, which was that a year ago Mark would not have been the one sent for ice — he would have been the one holding court in the living room, telling everyone how good the house looked. A year ago, a lot of things were different.
We spent the hour before dinner in the kitchen, all of us, in the particular choreography of a family that has cooked together before: Tina reheating her pies, Eleanor stirring something, Josh sneaking pieces of turkey skin when he thought Margaret wasn't looking (she was always looking), me doing whatever Margaret pointed at. The house filled with heat and noise and the smell of the turkey, and through the kitchen window I could see the backyard, bare now in late November, the fence line clean and straight.
At one point, Margaret caught my eye across the kitchen and smiled — a real smile, unguarded — and I felt something in my chest loosen that I hadn't known was still tight. I thought about all the Thanksgivings I had missed in Singapore — six of them — eating hotel food or takeout alone in my apartment, telling myself the money I sent home was enough. It had not been enough. But I was here now, and the green beans were adequate, and my mother was smiling at me across a steaming kitchen, and that had to count for something.
Chapter 39: Mark Arrives Early
The doorbell rang at half past twelve, and I went to answer it expecting the ice, and found Mark on the porch instead, alone, holding a bag of ice in one hand and a small potted plant in the other.
"You're early," I said.
"I'm the ice guy," he said. "Ice guys are punctual." He held out the plant. "This is for Mom. It's a rosemary. Tina said you can't kill rosemary, and I said, watch me, and she said don't you dare."
I took the plant. It was small and green and alive, and I had a sudden, absurd urge to cry. "Come in," I said. "It's cold out there."
He came in, stomping his boots on the mat the way he had all his life, and then he stood in the hallway looking around — at the photographs back on the mantel, at the study door standing open, at the dining room table set for seven — and something crossed his face that I couldn't quite read. Not guilt, exactly. Something older than guilt. Something like a man seeing a room he used to live in and remembering he doesn't anymore.
"Mom's in the kitchen," I said. "She'll want to see the rosemary."
We went into the kitchen together, and Margaret took the plant and held it up to the light and declared it "a fine rosemary" and set it on the windowsill above the sink, where it would get the morning sun. Mark stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching her, and then he said, "I can carry in the firewood, if you want it. For later. It'll be cold tonight."
"The firewood would be good," Margaret said. "Diane, go with him. Two people, half the trips."
So Mark and I went out to the woodpile behind the garage, and we carried in firewood together, armload by armload, the way we had when we were teenagers and our father had made it a Saturday chore. The air was sharp and cold, and our breath fogged, and the wood was rough against my sweater. We talked about work — his new position at the dealership across town, which was steadier than the car sales job he'd had before, and paid better; my remote project, which was going well — and about Josh, who was doing better in school than either of us had at sixteen, and about nothing important at all.