Grace's Table Read Online Free PDF Page A

– that’s really living it up.’
    Grace laughed with Susan. ‘As they say, sometimes it’s the small things.’
    Susan cleared another mango from her board into the bowl.
    â€˜Pa would come home and say, Look, Grace’s a hearth rug. Let’s bring the dog in too and they can both lie in front of the stove .’
    â€˜I bet Nan drew the line at that.’
    â€˜Definitely.’
    Grace couldn’t remember a more flagrant disregard of manners allowed by Mother at meal times than sitting cross-legged on the floor to eat – no bowl, no napkin.
    There had come a morning long ago when Grace had wanted to show her own children the same freedom soup had sometimes brought her as a child. She’d woken with the coldest feet she could remember having since moving to the hot north from Harvest. As she got up from her bed, she said the word soup without any prior thought or reckoning.
    The cold snap would be short-lived – they always were – but Grace was determined to celebrate its arrival all the same. Just as Mother had, when the first frosts came in hard and they lingered in the shade, even at midday. Out would come the heavy cast-iron pot. Mother would chop and dice anything to hand, then leave the brew to simmer and thicken on the old wood stove for the best part of the day. Grace’s cold snap hadn’t brought any frost but if she cooked soup she could pretend it was there. She saw it as a way of restoring a gentleness to the often hard memories of her mother.
    A mean south-westerly pummelled Grace’s windows as she boiled the soup bones that day. She cooked them until the meat fell away as tender morsels and the marrow had all but disappeared, the surface of the liquid glossy with it. The hard little pellets of barley became soft and plump at the bottom of the pot and the small squares of vegetables obligingly kept their shape.
    But that evening, as the soup simmered gently on the stove, Des came in the back door in front of a cold draught: ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked, before his jacket had even reached the coat hook on the back of the kitchen door.
    â€˜Soup.’
    â€˜What else?’
    â€˜Well, there’s bread and dessert, of course. But the soup’s a meal on its own.’
    â€˜You know I don’t like soup. I like chewin’ me food. I can take it from a spoon when I’m old and lost all me teeth.’
    â€˜But it’s so cold.’
    â€˜And why are those kids eatin’ on the sofa?’
    â€˜Mum said we could play hearth rugs,’ Claire called from the adjoining room. The music to Gilligan’s Island jangled in the background.
    Grace suddenly felt foolish, for imagining Des would be as easygoing as Pa.
    He went to the fridge looking for leftovers, but there were none.
    Then he slammed the fridge door shut and wrenched open the freezer door. He crashed frozen bundles about inside, eventually pulling out a plastic bag that held a slab of beef fillet. There for a special occasion, Grace remembered he had said when he brought it home from work.
    Frozen meat in hand, Des went out the back door. Grace saw the light from his shed flicker on through the kitchen window. Fleetingly she thought how cold it must be outside, no jacket and a two-pound slab of frozen beef in your hands. Above the wind she heard the bandsaw start up.
    A few minutes later Des came back in, a slightly less than two-pound piece of beef in one hand and a frozen slice of steak in the other.
    He dropped the larger piece back in the freezer and threw the steak on the bench in front of Grace.
    â€˜I’ll have it with mash and fried onion,’ he said, and headed towards the bathroom. ‘And there’ll be hell to pay if you kids make a mess in there!’
    Grace stopped peeling the mango and looked at a spot on the kitchen wall, as though the memory was projected onto it. ‘There were so many rules.’
    Susan shrugged.