The kitchen went very quiet.
“A background element,” I repeated.
“I didn’t mean…”
“It’s all right. I understand perfectly.” I folded my hands on the table. “I was a background element in my own home. For twelve hours. Doing the work that Loretta got the credit for.”
Beside her, Loretta had gone gray.
“Britney,” she said, in a low voice. “Be quiet.”
“Mother, she’s…”
“Be quiet.”
It was a tone I recognized. The tone of a woman who’d spent forty years being the face of something and had just heard it said out loud.
I turned to her.
She hadn’t said a word this whole time. She sat very straight with her handbag in her lap, her white hair set in a perfect wave, her pearls at her throat. In the light from my kitchen window, she looked like a stained-glass saint. Composed. Unreadable.
“Loretta,” I said. “I’d like to ask you something.”
“Yes, Eleanor.”
“Did you cook any of that food?”
The silence stretched out long.
“No,” she said.
“Did you say you did?”
“I…” Her chin trembled. “Somebody asked how big the ham was. And I said sixteen pounds.”
“Did you say who made it?”
“I did not.”
“Did you correct anybody who said you had?”
She closed her eyes.
“No,” she whispered.
I let it sit there. I looked at her, an elegant, aging woman in a pantsuit the color of cake frosting. And I thought about a little girl in my lunch line years ago, so ashamed of the free-lunch stamp on her hand that she kept it in her pocket the whole time.
“Why not?” I asked.
Loretta opened her eyes. They were wet. And surprisingly young.
“Because I’ve never been able to cook,” she said.
Garrett lifted his head. Britney went rigid.
“Not one thing,” Loretta said. Her voice cracked. “I’ve never made a meal in my whole life. My mother did it. Then my husband’s mother. Then a cook named Mrs. Abernathy for thirty years. I’ve never roasted a chicken. I’ve never boiled an egg.”
A tear slid down her powdered cheek.
“And then my daughter said, Mom, you could be the face. You’d be perfect. And for the first time in my life, somebody told me I was good at something.”
I sat very still.
“I knew it was wrong,” she said. “I knew it when I took off my coat and dropped it in your arms. I thought, what am I doing? And I couldn’t stop. Because they were all looking at me. And I wanted so badly to be the woman who’d made it.”
“Loretta.”
“I’m so ashamed.”
“I know.”
“That ham was beautiful,” she whispered. “I’d never seen anything like it. I stood in your dining room and I thought, this is what it feels like to make a thing that people want. And you were in the kitchen. And I let them send you there.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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