Free Someone by Alice McDermott

have been, but I turned off the oven anyway, simply to dispatch the task. I joinedthe girls again just as they were gathering themselves to leave the stoop and walk slowly down the street, pretending we only wanted to get a soda.
    When I came home again, my father was at the dining-room table and my mother was bringing him his tea. My mother crooked her finger and led me into the kitchen, where the loaf, sitting on the cutting board, was darker than it had been. “What time did you take this out?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.
    “When you told me to,” I said vaguely.
    “It was hardly cooked,” she said.
    I shrugged, indicating both that I could not be blamed and that it was all of no matter to me.
    My mother sliced the rebaked bread and carried it in to my father where he sat at the cloth-covered table. I followed with the butter. Gabe’s place at the table was empty now. Now, after dinner, we listened to the radio.
    The tea was poured. My father spread the butter on the thick slice of bread and winked at me before he took a bite. And then chewed, and then moved his mouth as if his tongue had been burned. He swallowed and took a drink of tea. My mother said, “Too much baking soda,” and placed her barely bitten piece of bread on her plate. And then put her hands in her lap, her back straight. “You must have added it twice,” she said, sternly enough to show that she understood this was sabotage. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”
    I had added it, in fact, four times, with my back to my mother and my mother’s impatience—Glory be to God, read the recipe, Marie, how will you ever learn—making her, on three separate occasions, turn away.
    “You’ll have to learn to pay more attention, Marie,” my mother was saying. “You’ll never learn to cook if you don’t payattention. A kitchen can be a dangerous place if you don’t pay attention.”
    “Oh, she’ll learn,” my father was saying, amused. “She’ll learn in good time.”
    I bowed my head and studied my hands. I would not, I knew. I would not learn. Gerty Hanson had learned, but I would not.
    I raised my eyes slowly, touching my glasses back onto my nose, well pleased with myself, but careful not to give this away. The day had grown cloudy and the dining room was dim. My father had returned the piece of bread to his plate, but as if to convey his sympathy, he still held the edge of it gently between his thumb and index finger—perhaps not wanting to hurt my feelings any further by letting go of it completely. His other three fingers, held delicately aloft, were trembling. His broad hand against the white cloth and the china plate was a color I had not expected: the gray fingernails sunk too deeply into the swollen yellow flesh. His flesh was swollen, thin as he was. I looked at his smiling face. Although we were only a few feet apart, across the familiar cloth at the familiar table, I felt my eyes strain, as they sometimes did when close things seemed suddenly to contract into a great distance. In my recollection, there was something of the smell of ether in the air.
    That night, I found my mother sitting on my bed when I came out of the bathroom in my slippers and my robe. She asked me, “How are you?”
    Surprised by her presence, I replied, “Fine, thank you, and yourself?” which was how she always answered when asked the same question by people on the street. Now she looked a little surprised. She said she was fine, thank you, as if by instinct alone. Her hands were in her lap. Her back was straight.
    “Although,” she said, conversationally, as if we were indeed neighborhood ladies meeting on the street, “I’m a bit worriedabout your father.” She told me then that he was going to stop by the hospital tomorrow, to see if they couldn’t fix him up.
    I said, with street decorum, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    I felt no threat from this news, blithe child that I was, because my thoughts were all on the strange sight of my