“I’m on break,” Emily said. “Ruth made it a break by looking at me. It’s the only kind of contract she writes.”
She brought the pie and a fresh pot and sat again. For a moment they were only three people at a diner window with a dessert that had too much cinnamon, which is the right amount if you have been doing mathematics with your nerves. Caleb took a bite and then, remembering he had intended to refuse, took another to cover the inconsistency. Cars moved on the road. The light had changed. It was the light of late afternoon, which in Glenfield came in low and turned the red booths a color older than the suburb.
“My father is Thomas Harlan,” Emily said. “He lives eight minutes from here, in the house I grew up in, the ranch on Cedar with the maple that drops its keys all over the walk. He taught shop at the high school for thirty-one years. Not mathematics. Wood, metal, the ethics of measuring twice. He had a stroke three years ago in April. Not the kind that ends the sentence. The kind that rearranges the sentence and then stands there, expecting you to read it. His right hand was a stranger to him for a while. His words came with gaps, like a letter that has been left in the rain. He is better now. He can build a birdhouse slowly, and he can lose an argument with the evening news, and he forgets the names of actors but not the names of his students. Someone had to be here for the first year in a way that a phone call from another state is not. I was the someone. I don’t have brothers or sisters. My mother died when I was twenty-six, of a cancer that was rude and ordinary and not a story I tell over pie. I came home.”
She said it evenly. Caleb had stopped pretending not to listen. His fork rested in the apple. Denise did not interrupt, which Emily respected. The diner’s noise made a border around the booth and kept the story from having to be a confession. It could be a thing said at a table.