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By Root 1045 0

spruce in their grand center hall at Christmastime. Although Shern was moody at times, and Victoria tended toward the serious, and Bliss had the aunts’ penchant for quick, hard-hitting insults, they minded Clarise, whom they adored and who doted on them like a momma cat. “My girls this” and “my girls that” were the center of all her conversations with the neighbors, the patrons of Heavenly Caterers, even the bishop at the AME church she’d joined. Finch rarely lifted his voice higher than a coo to the girls; they were his little darlings, and he made them brownies from scratch every Tuesday night. No matter how large-scale a food preparation job he was on, it halted on Tuesday nights so that his girls would have their favorite brownies, fresh and hot with walnuts, to dunk in their milk. And of course the aunts and uncles visited weekly, the aunts reminding the girls to hold their backs straight, the uncles sneaking them pieces of their homemade butterscotch candies.

Such was the fine cloth of a world of Clarise and Finch, Shern, Victoria, and Bliss. But then in 1965 came the pulled thread, then the snag, finally the stitches that came undone, loop by loop, row by row, until their perfect storybook world unraveled completely right on that old-money block in the house called Heaven.

It was early morning, in January 1965, and daylight was tapping on the window to Finch’s kitchen; he liked to call it his cook’s studio since it was separated from the rest of their house by a terrace and a garage like an artist’s studio. This morning he’d come in through the tunnel that ran underground and used to hide slaves and was connected to the rest of the house through a crawl space in the basement. It was a lot to go through just to avoid walking outside, especially after he still had to go out on the side of the kitchen that faced the woods, hose himself down from the dust he’d picked up on the way over. “Oh, go away, daybreak,” he muttered as he flung his hands against the window. “I don’t want to entertain you right now.”

He covered three dozen chicken cutlets with his orange marinade and then checked the temperature on his oven, which he’d just gotten the year before from a restaurant supply store. “Hate to use all this oven for such a paltry amount,” he said to the wide kitchen air that was swathed in the daybreak that had come on in and taken a seat despite Finch’s reluctance to be social.

He pushed the baking pan into the oven, and almost instantly the sweet, acid aroma of his prizewinning orange marinade billowed through the kitchen. He took a seat at the table across from the daybreak, ran his fingers along the gullies his knives had made over the years in his oak cook’s table; he looked for recent cut marks, there weren’t many, he knew, lately he’d been able to do all of his cutting on the board that fit over the sink.

He sat there breathing deliberately, waiting until he could detect the scent of pepper through the orange, his cue to turn the cutlets. But instead a whiff of something like fresh grass rushed into the kitchen, and he looked up, and there Clarise stood, still in her robe and slippers, her hair straight and brushed back, giving a show to that face that had melted him all those years ago.

“I hope you’re garnishing with parsley,” she said as she slid inside the door, shook the daylight from the other chair, and sat down at the table. “You know green goes with orange; please, no purple cabbage this time like you used for the Wellingtons’ party. Green, when you marinate in orange, your garnish must be green.”

“I was going to use green, I’ll have you know,” Finch said, agitated, wanting to spend the beginning of this day with himself and his cutlets. “And please don’t start in with me about colors so early. First the daybreak comes rushing in, and now you.” He went to the refrigerator, pushed the colander of cut purple cabbage to the back, pulled out a brown paper bag with parsley leaves hanging out.

“Well, my flat-footed man, you’d have a better chance of keeping the daylight from coming in here than me.