The kitchen smelled like potatoes browning in butter. Grandma stood at the stove in the apron with the small cornflowers on it, the wooden spoon in her right hand, her left hand resting on the handle of the pan like she was reminding it to behave. Grandpa sat at the table with one of Rhea's school dresses across his knee, working the tacks out of the hem with the flat blade of his little knife, careful, slow, the way he did everything. The radio on the windowsill was low. Some old song with horns in it. The light coming through the window over the sink had that early softness to it, the kind that made the wood of the cabinets look warmer than wood had a right to look.
Three months. Three months and a handful of days.
That was how I counted now. I counted by what I had. The mug in my hand. The plate Grandma slid in front of me without asking. The small clean sound of Grandpa's knife working a tack loose from cotton. I had stopped counting by what I didn't have. There wasn't a number for that.
"Sit down, son," Grandma said, without turning.
"I'm sitting."
"You're standing by the chair. That's not sitting."
I sat. She set the pan down off the burner and came over and put her hand on the top of my head the way she did every morning, then went back to the stove. She'd been doing that since the third week. The first two weeks she'd just been quiet, watching me from the doorway like a person watches a stray cat that might let itself be kept.
Grandpa pulled another tack out. He set it on the saucer beside him. There were six tacks on the saucer.
"You're going to wear that knife out," I said.
"Knife's older than you are," he said. He didn't look up. "Knife's fine."
I drank the coffee. It was strong the way she made it, which was strong enough that I'd had to learn to like it. I'd learned. The list of things I'd learned to like in three months was longer than the list of things I remembered liking from before. The list of things from before was empty.
The hallway floor creaked. Rhea came around the corner with her phone in her hand and her chin set the way she set it when she'd been thinking about something on the way down the stairs and didn't want to lose the courage of it before she could say it. Two short braids. The blue dress with the little white dots, over jeans, the way she always wore it. Both front teeth still gone. She'd been working on those teeth for a year now.
She didn't say good morning. She climbed onto the bench next to me without asking, set the phone face down on the table, and put both her elbows on the wood like a person about to make a sales pitch.
"Brother Pete," she said. "Can we go to the mall?"
I set the mug down.
"I don't know where the mall is, Rhea."
I said it gently. I didn't know where most things were. I'd built a small life out of the streets I could name and the turnsI could remember and I'd stopped feeling bad about the ones I couldn't.
Grandma didn't turn from the stove.
"Don't push your brother. He hasn't been to the town that far yet."
Rhea leaned closer. Both elbows still on the table. Her chin almost touching the wood.
"Please. I'll show you everything. The fountain. The store with the candles. The arcade."
She had never asked me for a thing. Three months and she hadn't asked me for one thing. She'd given me a name on the second day when I couldn't name myself. She'd told me Pete sounded like a brother's name and that had been that. She'd let me sit at the end of her bed when she was sick in the second month and read her a chapter of a book about a horse I didn't know I could read out loud until I was doing it. She'd told everybody at her school I was her brother and she'd dared them to say otherwise.
Grandpa lifted his eyes from the dress. He looked at me. Then he looked back at the dress.
"Pete. You sure? You might not be all the way back yet."
"My head's steady. The doctor said I was healed enough at the last visit." I looked at him until he looked up again. "Thank you both for asking me before you let me go."
Grandma turned from the stove. She crossed the floor and bent and kissed the top of my cheek, then my forehead. Her hands smelled like soap.
"You deserve the second life God gave you, son."
"Enough drama," Rhea said. "Let's go, brother."
I laughed. It came out of me quiet. Smaller than I expected. Not the laugh of a man I used to be, because I didn't have a man I used to be. Just a sound I gave to the girl because she'd earned it.
Grandma packed us two sandwiches in foil. Grandpa put a folded twenty in my jacket pocket and pretended he hadn't. Rhea held my hand all the way to the end of the gravel drive and didn't let go until the bus pulled up at the road.
