She knocked on the door of the Brooks house at 6:00, and Emily answered it before she had finished knocking, which confirmed that someone had been watching from the window. "You brought pie," Emily said with deep satisfaction, like a hypothesis confirmed. "I brought pie," Margaret agreed. Papa said, "You might not because bringing food to a dinner might seem like you were saying the food wasn't going to be good, but I said you definitely would." Emily held the door open with the authority of someone who ran the front half of the house.
"I was right." "Was there actually that conversation?" Margaret asked. "Papa had it with himself," Emily said. "Out loud in the kitchen.
He does that sometimes." Margaret stepped inside the house. She felt it before she saw it lived in. Not untidy. Lived in.
The specific difference being that untidy was accidental and lived in was the residue of actual life children's things in the places children put things. A coat on the wrong hook, a book opened face down on the table because someone had meant to come back to it. It smelled of wood smoke and something savory from the kitchen and the particular smell of a house that had children in it which was warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. Rose appeared from the hallway. She looked at Margaret with the same thorough assessment she'd given her at the market.
And then she crossed the room and took Margaret's free hand and said, "I want to show you my room." Rose, Nathan said from the kitchen doorway with the tone of a man who had anticipated this. After dinner, Rose said with the tone of someone making a concession. She kept hold of Margaret's hand. Dinner was venison stew and cornbread, and the sweet potato pie that Margaret had brought, which Rose announced at the start of the meal, should be saved for last, because good things should be waited for.
Nathan served the stew with the focused competence of a man who had learned to cook out of necessity and had gotten good at it through repetition. Emily described in detail the book she was currently reading and its various shortcomings. And Rose ate steadily and watched Margaret with those large dark eyes, checking something, measuring something with the patience of a child who had learned to be careful with what she wanted. Margaret sat at that table and ate dinner with three people and felt the strangeness of it like a physical thing. the strangeness of being included, of being sat down with, of being handed a bowl and a spoon and treated like someone who simply belonged in the space. She had not sat at someone else's table for dinner in years.
She had not been invited to sit at someone else's table in longer than she wanted to count. She kept waiting for the moment when it would feel like too much. It didn't come after the stew and after the cornbread and after the sweet potato pie, which Rose ate with her eyes half closed in the satisfied way of someone receiving exactly what they needed. Emily asked Margaret if she had ever read the book, the teacher had been lending out the one about the French pastry chef. And when Margaret said she hadn't, Emily immediately went to get it and began reading passages aloud.
And Nathan cleared the table with the quiet efficiency of someone doing a familiar thing. And Rose settled beside Margaret on the bench and leaned against her arm with the trusting weight of a child who had decided, just decided. No process, no negotiation, just the simple animal trust of a small person who had determined that this was a safe place to lean. Margaret sat very still and let her. Nathan came back and sat across the table.