Margaret Ashford's kitchen was smaller than the absence it had built.
I noticed that first, the way I noticed everything — by measuring the thing in front of me against the thing I'd expected. I'd spent four days imagining the woman who'd walked out on an eleven-year-old, and the imagining had made her enormous, a weather system, a force with the scale of the wound she'd left. But the kitchen was twelve feet of yellowed linoleum and a farmhouse sink and a window over it that looked out on rows of bare peach trees still weeks from leaf, and the woman standing in it came up to my collarbone.
