Memories in the Kitchen

She glances around, but the cobweb over the storage bins and the dusty shelves don't jog her memories. There's wet laundry in the washer, anyway; she bends to haul it into the dryer. Her jeans, Ben's running t-shirts--what's this, wadded up at the back? She pulls it free, shaking out its folds.

It's a memory of her and Eileen, running through the rain, umbrellas forgotten and Eileen's stubby little ponytails plastered to the side of her head. She's squealing, and spinning, and her little fingers are cold and slippery in Ruthanne's grasp. The memory's edges have bled a little, losing their color and focus; it might grow even more threadbare from a spin in the dryer, so Ruthanne takes it upstairs, hanging it on the clothesline in the yard to dry.

It's a breezy day, cool for this late in June. She hefts open the lid of the storage bin, looking for clothespins, to keep the memory from blowing away. Beneath the bag of clothespin, in the bottom of an old sandal, is another memory--a warmer summer day than this one, Eileen standing on the front porch, wearing too much makeup, crying and shouting at Ruthanne, who's crying and shouting right back. Eileen's boyfriend slouches behind the steering wheel of his car, avoiding Ruthanne's eyes. Ruthanne leaves the memory there, for another time; she really needs to go through everything she has stored, to collect the memories and take everything she doesn't need to Goodwill.

Ben is mowing the front lawn, the electric motor whining. Ruthanne waves at him, and he waves back, before she goes back inside. The electric kettle is out on the counter, next to the coffee tin; she sets the water to boil and opens the cupboard for cups and saucers and cookies. When she pulls out the open package of shortbreads, there's a little memory wedged in behind. Ruthanne takes it out and unfolds it along old creases. In it, she and Eileen are baking Christmas cookies, pressing reindeer and snowmen and bells into the dough and eating up the skinny, funny-shaped pieces left behind on the floury counter. She strokes the memory with her thumbs, turning it over fondly, finding, on the underside, the shrilling smoke detector and blackened shapes to be scraped off the pan--they'd forgotten to set the timer on the oven. She smiles, and shakes her head, and slides the memory back into the cupboard corner, in its own special place between the boxes of teabags.