Chapter 17
Early February
Kyla gripped the redpen until the bones of her hand pressed sharp against her skin.She hovered over the chart, blinked at the blur of names and Xs, and missed the first spread of ink.
What registered instead was the ache in her thumb and another hard gust rattling the window behind her, cold slipping in around the frame and settling deeper into the kitchen.
The overhead lights flattened everything.The room looked chalky and tired, late afternoon pressed thin by weather and worry.Papers covered the table from one end to the other.Post-it stacks leaned against a half-crumbled muffin.Old bills sat half-open beneath RSVP cards stamped with lipstick kisses.
Steam still rose from a mug gone untouched too long, the coffee inside edging metallic.Wind found some loose place beneath the eaves and set up a faint whine overhead.
She lowered the pen to Titus’s aunt’s name.Not for the first time.She had worried that row so much the paper had gone soft.Red lines crossed through it, then got scratched back out, then redrawn again.Mary Lou kept appearing in a messier hand each time.
This was the fourth chart.Or the sixth.Kyla pressed harder and felt the pen drag against the paper.The problem stayed the same.There was not enough room.Not for every relative.Not for every version of herself she was supposed to present.
Mary Lou had three possible tables and none of them worked.Table six put her beside Titus’s rodeo friends, which would leave her offended before supper ended.
Table eight stuck her beside the accountant who still called Kyla the “city chef” after months of free food and favors.Table ten was meant for special guests, which only meant the people who made Kyla talk too carefully.
She dragged the pen through Mary Lou again.The paper gave under her thumb with a rough little tear that cut all the way toward Uncle Hank.
Heat climbed the back of her neck.The quiet had started to feel hostile.Even the kitchen clock sounded too pointed.She had woken to one new email chain, her mother’s latest suggestions, and three voicemails from a co-op vendor who hid little knives inside every polite sentence.
Her socks were thick wool, but the floor still leeched cold into her feet.She had forgotten the baseboard heater again and could not make herself get up to fix it.
The wedding was seven weeks out.Seven weeks.One more person with advice about compromise and she was liable to staple this chart to their forehead.
A slab of snow slipped down the outside pane and pulled her attention to the yard.White sat high against the glass.The picnic table had nearly vanished under it.Her boots from yesterday’s run to the stock co-op sat half-frozen by the back step.
Her eyes burned from tracking the same names over and over.The ache at her temples kept time with the changing pitch of the wind.She drew in a slow breath, trying to ease the lock in her jaw.The air snagged halfway down.
There were only so many versions of herself she could perform in one day.Fiancée.Chef.Daughter.Event planner.The only Black woman in most of the rooms that mattered.Her father’s favorite disappointment.
She straightened from the table.Her back had curved over the chart so long it protested the movement.She had spent too many years under bright kitchen lights and apartment windows that never shut right to become the woman who folded under scrutiny.
Still, she stabbed Mary Lou one more time.The pen split the page again and the red spread wider.
Across the room, her phone pinged.A new message climbed over the three she had not opened.Denver.The supper club wanted a short call about private bookings.
Her mouth tightened.It all came back to the chart.Proof she could keep every plate spinning.Proof she belonged here in Montana, not as a guest, not as an experiment, not as the ambitious outsider people tolerated while things ran smooth.
One wrong table, one weak menu, one mistake at the wrong moment, and somebody would start counting reasons she had never quite fit.
The pen hovered.She flexed her grip, the joints in her hand clicking, then drove one last line through Mary Lou.This time the page caved under the pressure.Kyla leaned back and let the pen drop.
Snow slid from the porch roof in one long sheet just before Titus came in through the back door.Kyla did not look up.His boots scraped across the mat, dull against the linoleum.
She wrapped both hands around her mug and braced herself for the scan she knew was coming.Titus crossed the room.He stopped across from her and studied the chart like it might answer a question neither of them knew how to ask.Red ink drew his attention first.The ruined chart.Her stained thumb.The streak along the edge of the table.
