She started talking before I’d even settled anywhere, which should have been my first warning. Usually there’s a sequence to the evening — the bag goes down by the door, the shoes come off, something gets put in the refrigerator or taken out of it, and only after all that does she start making sounds with her mouth that aren’t directed at food or at me. Tonight she skipped straight to the talking, standing in the middle of the kitchen with her coat still half on one shoulder, saying something to the cabinets.
I want to say I recognized the shape of it right away, but I didn’t. It wasn’t the voice she uses on the phone, which has a specific brightness to it, a little performance in it even when she’s annoyed. It wasn’t the voice she uses for me, either, which is lower and slower and usually has my name folded into it somewhere. This was a third voice, clipped and serious, and she said a whole sentence to the stove and then stopped, made a face like she’d bitten something sour, and said the same sentence again with a different word in the middle of it.
I sat by the leg of the kitchen table and watched her do this four more times.
There was a piece of paper on the counter with handwriting on it, dense and slanted, and she kept glancing down at it between sentences the way I check the corner of the windowsill before committing to a jump. She’d read a line, look up, say it out loud to the room, wince, cross something out with the pen that was tucked behind her ear the whole time and had clearly been there longer than she remembered, and then start pacing. Refrigerator to hallway doorway. Hallway doorway back to refrigerator. Six steps each way, seven if she took the turn wide.
I followed her for the first two laps out of a sense that this was probably information I needed. There was no one else in the kitchen. I checked. I have gotten very good over the years at knowing precisely which rooms contain which people, and this one contained exactly her and exactly me, and yet she kept pausing mid-stride like someone across from her had just said something rude, and shaking her head, and saying “no — no, that’s not — okay” to absolutely nobody.
At one point she picked up the wooden spoon from the counter, the one that lives in the ceramic jar with the whisk and the thing with the teeth I’ve never seen used, and held it the way she holds her phone, out in front of her at an angle, and said an entire paragraph to it with real feeling. Her eyebrows did things. Her free hand cut through the air twice, sharply, like she was underlining a point for someone slow. Then she put the spoon down, exhaled through her nose, and said, quieter, to herself this time and not to the spoon, “that’s better, that’s the one.”
I don’t know what the one was. I don’t know what came before it that wasn’t the one.
I tried a few things to get some clarity on the situation. I sat directly in the middle of the six-step stretch between the refrigerator and the doorway, reasoning that if she was rehearsing some kind of confrontation, she ought to have to reckon with an actual obstacle rather than an imagined one. She stepped around me without appearing to notice she’d done it, still talking, and I found this more unsettling than if she’d tripped. I meowed once, at a volume I consider impossible to mistake for background noise, and she said “I know, I know” in the clipped serious voice, which told me nothing, because she wasn’t talking to me, she was mid-sentence to the cabinets and my meow had simply landed inside whatever she was already saying like a word that happened to fit.
I gave up on the floor plan and got up on the counter instead, near the paper, thinking I might get more out of proximity to the actual evidence. The handwriting meant nothing to me up close, which I expected, but I did get a good look at how much of the page had lines drawn through it, entire sentences struck out and rewritten smaller in the margin, one word circled twice. Whatever this was, it had needed several drafts before tonight, and tonight was apparently draft number however-many-out-loud, being tested against an audience of cabinets, a spoon, and me.
She caught me on the counter and moved me off it with one hand without breaking her sentence, which normally I’d protest, but I was too interested in what happened next to bother. She stopped in the doorway, went completely still, and said the whole thing again from the beginning — not the clipped serious version this time, something gentler, with a small pause in a different place than before — and at the end of it she just stood there a second, looking at the space in front of her like it might say something back.
It didn’t, obviously. There’s nothing there. I’ve confirmed this repeatedly over the course of the evening from multiple angles.
Eventually she folded the paper in half, then in half again, small enough to fit in her back pocket, and the whole performance stopped as abruptly as it started — no more pacing, no more spoon, no more sentences aimed at appliances. She got a glass of water like a person who had simply been standing in her kitchen doing nothing unusual at all, and when she sat down at the table she reached over and scratched behind my ear with the same hand that had been cutting through the air ten minutes earlier, and said, in her regular voice, the one that has my name in it, “what.”
I didn’t have an answer for her either. We sat there together, both of us apparently equally unclear on what had just happened in this kitchen, and I let her keep scratching, because whatever that was, it seemed to have taken something out of her, and my ear was right there.