Chapter 10 - The Restoration of the Table
By the spring of 2026, the Victorian apartment on 8th Street had become ours in the way only old houses can change. The sloping floors didn't bother us anymore; we’d put small wooden shims under the legs of Sophie’s desk so her pencils didn't roll off the edge, and the clawfoot tub’s rhythmic leak had become a sort of white noise that helped me sleep.
The divorce had been finalized in March.
It hadn't been clean, but it had been decisive. Adam had been forced to agree to a buyout of the Elm Street house—his sister’s boyfriend had lent him the cash to keep him from having to sell his truck, though Clara told me the interest rate they were charging him was practically criminal. He was living on Brenner Street now, in the downstairs bedroom, while Rachel and her boys had the top floor.
Carol had moved into an assisted living facility two towns over, paid for by the county after her condo sale funds were completely swallowed by Rachel’s old credit card debts. She called me sometimes on Sundays when Adam was at work, her voice sweet, small, asking how Sophie was doing in algebra.
I always answered. She was an old woman who had loved through need, and she didn't have anyone left to need her now.
On a Saturday in early May, the weather turned warm enough to open all the windows in the apartment. The air smelled of damp earth and the lilacs blooming along the alley.
A truck pulled up to the curb downstairs.
It wasn't a white truck. It was a rusty, blue flatbed belonging to a man named Thomas who lived up near the ridge—a friend of my dad’s from the old days at the mill.
Sophie ran down the stairs ahead of me, her hair tied back in a green ribbon that matched her old bedroom baseboards. She was fifteen now, her shoulders straighter, her laugh louder than it had been in years.
“Mom! It’s here!” she called up the stairwell.
I walked down to the street.
On the back of Thomas’s flatbed sat the oak kitchen table from the cabin. The buyers of the Miller place had been a young couple from Chicago who wanted to remodel the kitchen with stainless steel and marble; they’d called Dr. Patel’s office three weeks ago asking if the “Meredith Vance” on the old deed wanted the furniture left in the lean-to.
I had paid Thomas two hundred dollars out of my savings account to haul it down.
The varnish was cracked, the surface stained with thirty years of coffee rings, grease spots, and the tiny, neat initials M.M. that I’d carved into the underside with a pocketknife when I was eight years old.
“Where do you want it, Meri?” Thomas asked, wiping his brow with a grey handkerchief.
“Upstairs,” I said. “The kitchen.”
It took three of us to get it up the narrow, winding steps of the Victorian house, the heavy oak scraping against the wallpaper once near the landing, leaving a small, clean mark that looked like a scar.
We set it down in the center of our small kitchen, right under the window that faced east.
After Thomas left, Sophie went to her room to finish her history project. I stayed in the kitchen with a can of steel wool and a bottle of walnut oil I’d bought at the hardware store on the square.
I knelt on the floor, my sleeves rolled up, and began to rub the old wood.
The motion was rhythmic, heavy, the heat from my palms softening the old wax until the kitchen smelled of cedarwood, linseed oil, and the dry, sweet scent of northern timber. With every stroke of the steel wool, the grey, dead film of the cabin’s long abandonment began to lift, revealing the deep, golden grain of the oak beneath.
It was hard work. My shoulders ached after ten minutes, my fingers stained dark from the oil.
But as I worked, the light from the eastern window shifted, the afternoon sun hitting the surface of the table until it looked like honey—thick, warm, and entirely alive.
The money from the cabin was still in the First National vault—fifty-two thousand dollars of it, untouched, waiting for Sophie’s college tuition or whatever else her future required. It wasn't dead money anymore. It was seed money. It was the fence around our garden.
Sophie walked into the kitchen, her history binder under her arm. She stopped, looking at the table, then sat down on one of the mismatched wooden chairs we’d found at the thrift shop.
She laid her hand flat against the oak, her fingers tracing the golden grain near the center where a knot had formed a perfect, dark circle like an eye.
“It doesn't smell like the apartment anymore, Mom,” she said softly.
“What does it smell like?” I asked, leaning back on my heels, my hands covered in oil.
She smiled, and for the first time in two years, her face looked entirely peaceful, the sharp, defensive lines of Brenner Street completely washed away by the May sun.
“It smells like Granddad,” she said.
I stood up, walked over to the stove, and turned the kettle on to make tea. The water began to hum against the metal, a low, steady sound that filled the room, matching the rhythm of the wind outside.
May you like
The walls of the kitchen were old, the floor was crooked, and the tub downstairs was still leaking its teaspoon of water every three hours into the dark.
But as I stood there beside my daughter, looking out at the green hills where the snow had finally melted into the creeks, I knew that the house was safe. The walls were exactly where they were supposed to be, and no one was coming to measure them for curtains but me.
