I arrived first.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at the apple pancake pan still sitting on the drying rack from the last time Frank had made them for me, three weeks ago, before he was too weak to stand at the stove.
I didn’t touch it.
Gerald knocked even though he had a key.
A small performance of courtesy.
“Sweetheart.” He opened his arms in the doorway.
I let him hug me.
I kept my hands at my sides.
He stepped back and looked at my face with an expression of deep, practiced sorrow.
“I’m so sorry.
He was a good man.
The best I ever knew.”
“He was,” I said.
“Come in.”
We sat at the kitchen table.
I had made coffee.
Gerald wrapped both hands around his mug the way he always did, and for a moment he looked so familiar, so ordinary, so completely like the uncle I had known for forty years, that something in my chest pulled hard in the wrong direction.
