Home safe by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg [Berg, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Psychological, Family Life, Domestic Fiction, Mothers and Daughters, Widows, Psychological Fiction, Contemporary Women, Parent and adult child
ISBN: 9781400065110
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-04-28T14:14:36+00:00

sixteen

THE ROOM THAT HAS GREAT MEANING TO ME IS MY KITCHEN, DONETTA Johnson reads. It has great meaning because it brings me memories. Like of my mother and my grandmother and my husband James who liked to make coleslaw. Just about every night he would eat coleslaw if you let him and everyone said it was so good but his recipe died with him. The only thing is I know it did have barbecue sauce in it. This room also has great meaning to me because it's where my children used to like to sit after school and have some snacks and do their homework. And now they are grown and flown away. But when I am in the kitchen, seems like they are too. I can be washing dishes and it is almost like I can feel them behind me. Hear them, even. Sometimes when I eat dinner, I set an extra place for one of them. And so you see all these people I love are still with me when I am in my kitchen and that is why it has great meaning to me.

Donetta turns her paper over. “I don't know if that's what you meant, 'bout writing 'bout a room,” she says. “I don't know if I did it quite right.”

“You did it very well,” Helen says. “I really liked it when you talked about all those other people being with you even when you were alone.” She looks around the room. “What about the rest of you? What did you like?”

Jeff Daley says, “I liked the clear style, that you just told it like it is, but you really made us see more than was on the page. And feel it, too.”

The other students, emboldened as usual by hearing the first comments, begin to offer their opinions. Ella Parsons says she wants to taste that coleslaw; Henry Borman wonders if it wouldn't be a good idea to describe the room: the table and chairs, what's on the walls; Hector Rivera says she might say what her husband did for a living.

Helen listens, but not well enough: she's distracted by thoughts of the trip she and Tessa took to San Francisco. She can't stop thinking about the house. Last night, she dreamed she was there, standing out in the front yard, the sunlight bright around her. She was waving at two people in a red car who were pulling into the driveway. She was shouting “Welcome home!” but one of the people in the car was her.

“You should make this a short story,” Billy Armstrong tells Donetta. He is sitting with his chair tipped back on two legs, his arms crossed in a way that can only be read as defiant. His delivery is as scary as his countenance; what he says sounds less like suggestion than like diktat. But just as Helen is about to defend Donetta against his brashness, Donetta smiles and says, “Oh, I like that idea! I'm going to do that! Can I do that?”

“Of course,” Helen says, and begrudgingly smiles at Billy.

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