“What’s this now?” Aunt Rennie said, belligerent. “After I brought you the best meal you’ll have all week?”
“Come on, son,” our father said. “Be a good boy. Give your Aunt Rennie a kiss.”
Nate looked up at me, grabbing my hand.
But I pretended his fear was ridiculous, even though I’d suffered the same one just moments before. “Go on now. Stop hanging on me. It’s not like she’s gonna bite.”
Nate approached her and, after a final pleading glance in my direction, closed his eyes and leaned toward her cheek. Quick as a flash, she buried him in her big speckled bosom, and pretend- ed to sink her teeth in his neck. “Gobble gobble gobble! I got me a delicious little boy!”
Howling, Nate rushed to me and clung to my waist.
Aunt Rennie raised herself up with considerable effort. She crossed her arms over her stomach and shook her head at our father. “How you manage,” she said.
After she left, we ate her chicken. No one said a word. Our father, who was experimenting with table manners now that our mother was no longer around to demand them, cut his food into precise little triangles. Nate, who had always loved baked chicken, sat with his knees curled up to his chest, silently pulling the uneaten meat into strings.
Outside, it was dark. I stared at the square of glass over the kitchen sink, where during the day I could see the top of the smokehouse where our great-grandparents once cured their pork, and which now served as a garage for our father’s car. Beyond that sat tangles of bare oaks, pines, and tulip poplars, coated in ice. And in the distance, the hazy outline of another, larger, mountain––one that gave the mysterious impression of changing shape throughout the day, depending on where the sun happened to hang in the sky. At night, though, this window revealed nothing of the outside world, allowing us only the dim reflection of the kitchen’s back wall, dull yellow and splattered with grease, and punctuated by the nail from which our mother’s apron still hung.
At last, he couldn’t take it any longer. He swiped at his mouth with his napkin, reached in his pocket, and withdrew the hat she had knitted for him several winters earlier. Briskly, he pulled it over his head. “You kids behave now, will you? Gonna stretch these old legs a bit. Be back soon.”
When I heard the screen door slam, I installed Nate on the hide-a-bed in the main room, gave him a quilt, snapped on the TV, and told him I’d be back soon, too.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College, Karen Tucker is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.