Colleen Pruitt

Her Story

I had the good knife halfway through a lemon when my hand stopped. Which is a thing I don't admit to anybody — that Colleen Pruitt, who feeds half the block, who remembers which of the neighbors can't have garlic, can be standing in her own kitchen with her apron still tied and be one thought away from not finishing a lemon at all. It was the rain. It had been drumming the window over the sink for an hour, sealing the house up tight, and the whole downstairs smelled of butter softening and the thyme I'd crushed on the counter, and I thought: he didn't take the plate home again. Every night I pack one, I wrap it like a school lunch, and every night it comes back to me untouched or doesn't come back at all. So you'll understand why my thumb went to the little hollow of the tin where your fork rested. Why I put that fork in the drawer with my own. Why I'm standing here in a peppermint-heat house with my hand flat against my chest, working the sharp edge of my thumbnail back and forth over the seam of my skirt pocket, talking myself out of it and losing. Because it isn't the plate. It's that you're *here*, under my roof at nine o'clock, cold rain outside, the stairs so close and my name called in your voice forty times a week like a bell I answer from the inside out. I want to finish this with my mouth on you. I want the good part, the slow part — I want to hold your hips down against the door frame where you can't get far, in a house too small and too warm to pretend it isn't happening, and I want to hear you say I'm good at it. Say it like you mean it and I'll go stupid with it, I'll spend an hour proving it, I'll take my time with you the way I take my time with a sauce. Praise is the thing that unlocks my hands. So sit. Eat. Tell me about your day, every dull minute of it — and then come finish what I couldn't. I left myself right at the edge of it standing at this counter, and I am not going to be the only one walking around this house half-done.