You Are My Only by Beth Kephart Page A

Miss Cloris.”
    The air behind her smells of butter, sugar, chocolate. There’s a finger stroke of white across her face. She lets me into the first room, then leads me to the kitchen, pulls out a chair, raises an eyebrow. “You’re just in time,” she says, turning to the counter behind her and piling cookies on a plate and nodding so that I’ll take one. It’s sweet melt and chocolate chunk. It almost hurts, my hunger.
    â€œIt’s the Toll House,” she says. “Just made.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œSome milk?” she asks.
    I nod.
    She pours me a quick glass of milk, which fringes to the top with bubbles. She takes an apple from a basket, some crackers from the pantry, a block of cheese from the refrigerator door. “Might as well turn this into a party,” she says, and now Minxy arrives from around the corner, snaking her tail and leaping, with no trouble, onto the space above my knees.
    â€œI didn’t mean …,” I start.
    â€œI’ve been wanting to taste that cheese,” she says, “since I brought it home last Tuesday from the market.” She cuts herself a sliver and puts the whole thing in her mouth. She cuts me a wedge and insists.
    â€œWe’re one shy of a full morning deck,” she says, slipping out of the kitchen, around the corner, up the stairs. I cut another wedge of cheese, sandwich it between two crackers. I drink through the bubbles of milk. Finally I hear Miss Cloris on the stairs, and by the time I get to the clean front room, she’s halfway down, Miss Helen scooped into her arms like a child. Harvey rushes their ankles faster than I can catch him. When I call him, he listens—lowers his ears and lets the ladies pass.
    â€œI heard we have some company,” Miss Helen says. Her voice is small and tired. They reach the bottom of the stairs and stop, Miss Cloris lowering Miss Helen into her special chair. She straightens, combs her fingers through Miss Helen’s hair. Now Miss Helen sits and Miss Cloris rolls her and Harvey yips and when they get to the kitchen and are arranged at the table, everyone gets a slice of cheese, even Harvey, who they let me feed with my fingers. Miss Helen tests a cookie—breaks off a piece of a piece, closes her eyes. “You outdo yourself,” she tells Miss Cloris, but it’s as if Miss Cloris isn’t even listening. She’s watching Miss Helen, shadows beneath her eyes, and I think, and then I know, that Miss Helen looks smaller since the last of my visits. How many days? She looks smaller and Miss Cloris looks sadder, and suddenly Minxy is back and leaping to my lap, and I feel my stomach start to ache.
    â€œIs she better now?” Miss Helen asks me.
    â€œMa’am?”
    â€œYour mother. Joey mentioned …”
    I nod. It’s the best I can do.
    â€œYou must be a very fine nurse.”
    â€œI’m actually no kind of nurse.”
    â€œI am surrounded,” Miss Helen sighs, “by excessive modesty.”
    We spend the afternoon on an utmost urgent; that’s what Miss Cloris calls it. She goes away, then comes back and says, “We start with doweling rods.” Now she’s measuring them out—one sixteen inches, the other twenty-four, according to her metal ruler—making a Magic Marker line at both sticks’ cutting spots before she knives in and snaps off. When she’s done, she rules the sticks out again, putting another mark halfway up the short stick and a third up the long, and when that’s done, she holds the two sticks like a cross where the blue dots meet and ties them together with string. Next she notches the sticks’ ends, and Miss Helen sighs, and I watch, and I think how sure Miss Cloris is, how nice and neat each cut, and I remember my icosahedron on the kitchen table, not half as nice, not an utmost urgent, Archimedes leading to Kepler leading to silence and my mother sick, and all