Chapter 3

The next morning, I carried the pan downstairs before I unlocked the front door. I set it on the cold burner, loosened the cloth around its handle, and rubbed the blackened bottom with salt. The circle under my palm had outlasted three stoves and every chair Casper had replaced without asking me.

The girl delivering fish found me polishing it. She left two crates beside the sink, then stood with her pen suspended over the receipt.

"You're still doing next year's dinner?"

I kept the salt moving in tight circles. "Why wouldn't I?"

Her eyes dropped to the pan. The chamber had chosen Ilse in March. Everyone at the docks knew because Ilse had already asked which week the salmon ran best.

"March," I said.

The girl nodded once. Her pen scratched through the paper while my thumb pressed against the pan's warm rim. March had held Casper's birthday, two broken freezer hinges, and the week I had fed sixty-eight guests while he stayed home coughing. Somewhere inside those days, my husband had watched me mark next year's bookings and let me keep writing.

I signed the receipt and sent the fish back.

By noon, I was inside the chamber office with the padded case against my leg. The woman behind the counter recognized it. She had eaten our anniversary dish every November since her husband retired, always from the corner table where the radiator warmed his knees.

I asked for next year's dinner. Her hands stopped arranging forms, then resumed with unnecessary care. March. A unanimous choice. One year only. A welcome-home kindness that had seemed too small to require an awkward conversation.

"Put it back," I said.

Her mouth pinched. The decision was finished, the notices prepared, and changing it now would embarrass everyone. She offered me the spring luncheon instead, as though forty sandwiches could cover a room where I had remembered every marriage in town.

I opened the case on her counter. The old pan lay inside, dark and plain beneath the fluorescent lights. She looked at it, and for one hopeful second I saw recognition soften her face.

"Will you still make the dish?"

"For my guests."

She folded her hands over the forms. Ilse had the menu, the date, and the dining room. What happened in my kitchen remained mine, though the woman avoided those words as carefully as she had avoided my name in March.

I closed the case. My fingers missed the zipper twice before they caught it. I had come to recover an evening and learned there was no loose corner to pull.

On the way out, I passed the display prepared for next year's dinner. The seating plan had been pinned beneath a silver ribbon, with blank cards arranged around the long central table.

Only the two places at its head had been filled.

Ilse Novak occupied my chair. Across from her, Casper Brandt appeared in the narrow, backward slant I had watched form on twenty-three years of birthday cards.

I touched neither card. Behind me, the chamber woman began apologizing to my back. I lifted the padded case, turned around, and watched her run out of words.