She has been putting different plates on the top shelf because those are the plates that go there.
She was not being rude. She has been walking into her own kitchen for seven years and finding another woman in it, and neither of us has ever once said so out loud.
That does not excuse a single one of those twenty-three visits.
But it is the truth and I did not have it until half past five on the fourth of July, standing at the edge of a marquee, watching a sixty-six-year-old woman go and get a serving spoon out of a drawer she has known since 1986.
Now the menu cards.
They were nice. Sylvan’s menu on the front, printed, with a little line drawing of a pig at the top which was the printer’s idea and which was too much.
And on the back of every one, one line, centred, in small type:
