After a full day of teaching at the public school in Denver, I came home exhausted. My knees ached from standing on the playground asphalt at Lincoln Elementary, my voice was rough from reading aloud to twenty-eight third-graders, and all I wanted in the world was a cup of tea and two vanilla wafers. I walked into my kitchen—the same narrow, sunlit kitchen in the Jefferson Park neighborhood where I’d cooked thousands of meals—and stopped cold.
There was a new lock on the pantry.
A shiny silver padlock dangled from the door like it had always belonged there. I stared at it, not really understanding what I was seeing.
My purse slipped from my shoulder and thumped onto the tile. For a split second I honestly thought I’d come into the wrong house.
But then I saw the cracked tile by the stove that Arthur never got around to fixing, the basil plants in the window over the sink, and the dent in the old oak table where Sarah dropped a casserole dish when she was fifteen.
It was my kitchen. My house. Then I heard her voice behind me.
“Oh, you’re home.”
Clare walked into the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel.
She was wearing that pale pink silk blouse she loved to brag about—”two hundred fifty dollars at a boutique downtown”—the same amount of money I spent on groceries for an entire week at King Soopers. “What is this?” I asked, pointing at the lock.
My voice came out softer than I intended, thin and papery. She didn’t even look up at first.
“It’s so you don’t touch our things,” she said lightly.
Then, as if remembering her script, she added, “Ryan and I bought some special items for ourselves. Imported goods, organic olive oil, that sort of thing. We don’t want them getting mixed up with the other stuff.
It’s just to avoid problems.”
To avoid problems.
As if I were the problem. “But, Clare,” I said slowly, “this is my pantry.
This is my house.”
She finally looked at me, and in those brown eyes I had once thought were gentle, I saw only a cool, flat distance. “Oh, Eleanor, don’t take it personally,” she said, with a little laugh.
“It’s just organization.
You have your space, we have ours. It’s the healthiest way to live together, don’t you think?”
My space. In my own house.
As if I were a tenant they were graciously tolerating.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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