Ezoic
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Mark said.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Kitchen,” Diane said. “She’s been in there all afternoon. She’s trying to make something. She keeps getting the recipe wrong. I didn’t have the heart to stop her.”
Mark walked into his mother’s kitchen.
I followed him. I stopped in the doorway. Diane stopped next to me.
Frances Holloway was standing at the stove. Eighty-one years old. Small and round in a blue housedress and a flowered apron. Her gray hair was pinned up with bobby pins, some of them falling out.
There was a big dented pot on the stove. Something was simmering in it. It smelled like beef. And onions. And something burnt.
She turned around.
She saw Mark.
She stopped.
She stared at him for a long time. Her face was blank. Searching.
Mark stood in the middle of the kitchen with a white paper bag in his hand. From a donut shop in Columbia.
