Coming Apart - Darcy Vebber

The dining room table was really too big for the room. It came from another larger house, farther out of town, that no longer existed. That house had screened porches and breezeways.

When it still stood, it stood in the middle of miles of open space, outside Cottonwood. When it still stood, that was a little town. Farmers and ranchers came to its post office and its gas station and its feed and supply. Over time, it became a distant suburb of Phoenix. Miles of square one story houses in square fenced yards, broken up by swaths of big box stores and supermarkets.
Bobby's mother had saved the table. When the house was being knocked down, she had the wrecking men load the table on to a truck and drive it to her little house in Central Phoenix. When they brought it inside, it scarred the doorpost under the mezzuzah and left a long scratch in the dining room wall.

The chairs, by this time, were broken and discarded. For a while, the table sat in the dining room unused, without chairs. Then she got a cloth that fit, to cover its scratches and mars, then she got chairs.

When they were all seated at this table, only Bobby's mother could get up. Her seat was near the kitchen door. That suited her. She didn't want anyone else in her kitchen. Growing up, in the house with the porches and the miles of cotton fields around it, she often felt trapped in the kitchen. Her mother, Bobby's grandmother, had strict standards and a fierce sense of order. She had given up the separate plates for meat and dairy when she came to Cottonwood. It was just too much to keep track of and crazy, the crazy superstition of uneducated people. But how could she give up the sense that every plate, every fork and knife and pan, had a place and had to be in it or there would be a price to pay?

In Bobby's mother's kitchen, there was a pleasant kind of chaos. She liked to experiment with unusual spices and new tools. She was the first person she knew to have a Cuisenart. Bobby liked to be in the kitchen with her. He wanted to learn everything. She liked teaching him -- she always liked teaching him -- but she never quite got over the feeling of even one other person in that room as a crowd.

In high school, when he wanted to have his friends over, she let him make the dinner. It was easier for her, no matter what kind of mess he and his friend Sam made, to clean up after.