I touched my silver wedding ring, spinning it twice around my knuckle before I answered. “I use it for the Sunday rolls.”
“It is forty pounds of steel,” Brenda said, sliding it toward the edge of the counter. “A slip of the wrist is all it takes to break a tile.”
She turned her attention to the dark corner under the sink where I kept the wicker basket. She pulled it out with a jerk, her face tightening as she looked inside.
“Potatoes and onions do not belong together,” she said, pointing to a dark, soft spot on a russet. “The gases from the onions make the potatoes rot twice as fast.”
I looked at the grey fuzz growing in the eyes of the potatoes. I had only bought them last week, or at least I thought it was last week.
“These little things add up, Mom, and you might not notice them,” Brenda said.
She reached into her pocket for her phone, her fingers tapping the screen before she set it down on the counter with the camera lens pointing toward the sink. I wondered why she kept the camera app open as she carried the wicker basket to the trash.
By two in the afternoon, the smell of damp oak in Arthur’s workshop felt like a safer place to be. I sat on a low wooden stool, watching him run a hand plane over the side of a white oak drawer.
The curls of wood fell to the concrete floor like dry ribbons. Arthur stopped, lifted his wire-rimmed glasses, and began to wipe them with the hem of his red flannel shirt.
“Saw your daughter-in-law down at the corner this morning,” Arthur said, his voice gravelly and slow.
“She was helping me clear some things in the kitchen,” I said.
“She was talking to Miller,” he said, squinting through his clean lenses before putting them back on. “The one with the real estate sign down on Broad Street.”
I watched a wood shaving drift near my shoe, my fingers tightening on my purse. “Greg did not mention any move to me.”
“They were standing by his Buick for ten minutes,” Arthur said. “She had her phone out, showing him something.”
I did not ask what she was showing him. I thought of the empty spot where my bread box belonged, and the cold way she had looked at my pantry.
