Love Me From the Kitchen
Walking up the white, paved parking pad at 5026 Exeter Road, my left hand rests in my mother’s right, and the tips of a few tall pine trees touch a sky the color of murky water. We are losing daylight. I look up at Mom, and she looks down at her boots, or maybe the ground between them. Beneath me, two small feet are buckled into a pair of black, burnished “dressy shoes,” the same kind I wear whether I am dressed up or not. These are new, a full size up, and their stiffness makes them foreign. Through thick, bleached socks I can feel blisters forming on my tender pinky toes. By the end of second grade the shoes will be familiar, but today my feet are sore.
We never enter through the front door, which is always colored with a wreath to fit the season. Today it is a wide circle of leaves and twigs, perforated by a random scattering of red berries and pinecones. The dark-railed porch features a collection of pink and red petunias. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve walked in that way, and all five times I was trick-or-treating.
As we near the side door of my mother’s childhood home—a place where I, too, will grow up, but in a different way—I tread through a small pool of shiny spigot water. A few thin rivers cross the width of the drive, and I trace them back to their source: twelve inches of faded, green hose connected to a waxy, red faucet handle. Pops must have been watering the plants or rinsing his hands of motor oil. We round the corner toward the gray-trimmed glass door. Mom opens it and metal scrapes metal as the old hinges do the same work they’ve been doing for forty-five years. She lets the screen rest on her backside as she works on the thick, powder blue door just beyond it; eyes trained on the lock, jaws clenched, serious. She pushes the second door open and I sneak up one concrete step, past my grandmother’s white orthopedics into a small, sand-colored breezeway.
My toes heave a sigh of relief as I leave the dressy shoes behind, beside the plastic cabinet that hides bottles of red wine and 7-Up. I climb up one more step into the dining room and shuffle my white socks across the slippery linoleum floor. Mom follows. The house smells sweet and familiar, a mixture of fried oil and powdered sugar, fresh flowers and fake ones. Alex Trebec’s muffled voice cuts through the dimness, I’m sorry, Susan. The correct answer was, ‘What is Iceland?’
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