She smiled and went back to the kitchen and started putting things away.
His refrigerator was the refrigerator of a single man who didn’t waste food. A jar of mustard, a butter dish with a lid, a half-empty carton of orange juice, a single tomato, and three small Tupperware containers stacked in the back that she had a strong suspicion were leftovers from the Shack he’d brought home. She rearranged what was there to make room for what she’d brought. The milk on the inside of the door. The eggs on the second shelf. The cheese in the drawer with the mustard. The mandarins in a bowl on the counter because they didn’t need refrigerating. The bread under a clean towel.
The jar went in the fridge, the towel folded next to it.
She closed the fridge and turned around.
Bernie was watching her from the recliner. His eyes had been open the whole time she’d been reorganizing his refrigerator,and he wasn’t watching the television or the book or the window. He was watching her.
She turned back to the counter.
His kitchen was small. White cabinets that had been white for a long time but were still white. A two-burner stove with one of those pull-out cutting boards underneath that nobody had pulled out since the seventies. A drying rack with one mug and one plate and one fork in it from his breakfast. A coffee maker—drip, not fancy—with the carafe upside down on a folded paper towel.
It was tidier than she’d expected. The front window was big and the afternoon light was coming through it and falling on the floor in a warm rectangle. The low bookshelf along one wall was full but not overloaded—local history, atlases, a set of marine biology books with cracked spines, a row of paperbacks that were mostly mysteries. A small writing desk in the corner with his tablet docked. A wing chair beside the desk. The recliner where he was sitting. A coffee table with yesterday’s paper folded in quarters and today’s on top of it.
There were a few plants. Two on the windowsill—one of them a spider plant that had to be older than her grandchildren—and one larger one in a clay pot by the front door, the kind that stayed alive for decades.
A wall of photos covered the small hallway between the living room and the bathroom. She went down the hall to put the hand towel she’d brought on the rack.
She stopped in the hallway.
The photos were in frames. Two boys in matching shirts at what looked like a beach in the nineteen-fifties—Bernie and his brother, she could tell from the jawline. A wedding photo she didn’t recognize—a bride, a groom, Bernie in a tuxedo standing slightly behind them. His nephew, maybe. A black-and-white shot of a shaggy dog on a porch, ears up, lookingat something off-camera. The Laguna newsstand from the early eighties, Bernie in an apron in front of it, holding a stack of papers, KLEIN’S NEWSSTAND on the awning. And in the last frame, two men at a table under a striped umbrella—one of them Bernie, younger, hair still dark. The other one she recognized from a place so deep she had to stand there for a second before the name came.
Richard.
She looked at all of them for a long time.
She put the hand towel on the rack in the bathroom and came back.
Bernie’s eyes were open.
“You found the photos.”
“I was putting a towel up.” She sat down in the wing chair beside the desk.
He didn’t say anything else about them. Neither did she.
She heated it on his two-burner stove, the kitchen filling with the smell of chicken and rosemary and something that her own grandmother had put in every pot of soup she’d ever made. She found a bowl in the cabinet above the sink, found a spoon in the drawer to the left of the sink and brought him the bowl on a small wooden tray she found leaning against the side of the refrigerator.
“You’re not eating?” he asked, taking the tray and looking at the bowl.
“I had something at home. Go ahead and eat.”
He did. Slowly. She sat in the wing chair and let him eat while the light through the window moved a few inches across the floor.
“It’s good,” he said, putting the spoon down.
She laughed and shrugged. “It’s the same one I always make.”
“That’s why it’s good.”
He had two-thirds of the bowl, then pushed the tray a few inches away from him on the table and closed his eyes.
“I’m going to sit here for a minute,” he said.
“Sit as long as you want.”
She took the tray to the kitchen, washed the bowl and the spoon and placed them in the rack. She stood at his sink for a minute with her hands on the edge and looked out the window above it, which faced a small back garden she had not known he had. There was a lemon tree. There was a wooden bench. There was a pot of rosemary that was thriving in a way her own rosemary had never thrived.
