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I don’t have to make Mama’s kitchen again.

I can make a new one. Mine. Ours. It’ll sound different, and smell different. There’ll be a dog, and a swing on that oak branch, and a man in the doorway who notices everything. It’ll be loud in its own way. Safe in its own way.

And one day, if I’m very lucky, there’ll be a little girl in it with gray eyes. When she has nightmares, I’ll sit on the end of her bed and hum to her until she goes back to sleep. Badly, like a goose with a head cold.

She’ll never once feel scared while I’m in the house.

I close my eyes and finally, finally sleep.

CALEB

The sneeze painting is gone.

It went on Monday. I came downstairs and found Galana standing on a dining chair in the hallway in her socks, wrestling it off its hook, and when I asked what she was doing she said, “You told me I could throw it out,” and dropped it on my foot.

In its place there’s a photograph now, in a plain wooden frame. A young woman in a green dress, laughing at whoever’s holding the camera. She has light brown hair and dark eyes, and she looks so much like my wife it stops me every time I walk past it.

The cream sofa’s gone too. There’s a new one in the living room, deep and blue and a little bit shabby on purpose, with cushions you sink into. On the terrace, under a canvas awning, there’s a long wooden table she found at an antique barn in Lake Forest. Around it are twelve chairs, and none of them match.

The dining room is not yet yellow.

She says it’s next week.

Three weeks after the funeral, we host a family dinner.

That’s what Galana calls it, anyway. In practice, I’m allowed to open wine and move furniture and stay out of the kitchen. My wife has been in there since seven this morning, and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.

Every burner on that six-burner range is going. Both ovens. There’s dill and garlic and roasting chicken and something with cherries, and the windows over the sink are completely steamed up. She’s got her sleeves pushed up and flour on her cheek and her hair falling out of its clip, and she’s singing.

I stand in the doorway with a crate of wine in my arms and listen.

“You’re doing it again,” she says, without turning around. “Watching me.”

“It’s my kitchen.”

“It’s my kitchen.” She turns and points a wooden spoon at me. “You said so. You’re not allowed in until the pelmeni are done.”

“Galana.”

“Shoo.”

I go.

At my feet, a small, fat, gold-colored puppy trips over his own paws trying to follow me, falls on his face, and rights himself with great dignity.

Ivor sent him.

He was delivered in a crate, with a red bow and a card in Natasha’s handwriting. For the dog you agreed to. Love, I & N. Under that, in Ivor’s scrawl: Independence isn’t isolation. Enjoy the noise.

Galana cried. I swore. The dog was sick on my shoes.

She’s named him Pelmen. He sleeps in Leo’s dog bed by the back door and nowhere else.

The entire family arrive at six.

Arina and Garick first, in the same car, arguing about something before they’re out of it. It’s the route, or the parking, or whether Garick’s allowed to take Arina’s arm on the gravel. She shakes him off. He takes her arm again. She lets him. They’re getting married in a week, on the twenty-eighth, and Galana says Arina’s already planning to wear red to her own wedding in defiance. Garick says he doesn’t care what she wears, as long as she turns up.

Arina hugs her sister on the step for a long time. Then she looks over Galana’s shoulder at me, standing in the hall, and nods once. Firm. Like a deal’s been signed.