Margaret lowered her eyes.
Claire continued.
“When I met Daniel, he told me his mother lived in the same house where he grew up. It never occurred to me that it could be this house.”
Margaret looked at her.
“What about after you came here?”
Claire swallowed.
“The first time Daniel brought me here, the kitchen was different.”
That was true.
They had remodeled it nine years after Claire left.
The yellow curtains were gone.
The old green cabinets had been replaced.
The wallpaper with tiny strawberries had been stripped away.
“The plate was in a box in the pantry,” Claire said. “I saw it years later.”
Margaret remembered.
After her husband died, she had pulled out older dishes because she could no longer bear seeing his favorite brown coffee mug every morning.
Claire had probably found the blue plate then.
“And you never connected me?” Margaret asked.
Claire looked at her.
“I didn’t remember your face clearly.”
The words hurt more than they should have.
Margaret nodded anyway.
“You were a child.”
Claire laughed shakily.
“I remembered your hands better.”
Margaret looked down at them.
Thin now.
Veined.
Knuckles swollen.
Claire stared too.
“You wore a silver ring.”
Margaret touched her right hand.
The ring was gone.
She had stopped wearing it after arthritis made her fingers swell.
“My mother’s ring.”
“It had a little green stone.”
“Yes.”
Claire looked away.
Daniel sat silently.
Margaret could see him struggling to fit his wife into a childhood story he had barely noticed.
Then Claire’s expression hardened again.
