The House Rearranges the Kitchen at Night

It started so gently that I gaslit myself for months. A mug I'd left handle-left would be handle-right. Chairs I'd leave pulled out — I'm a leave-it-out person, my late husband was a push-it-in person, and this matters — would be neatly pushed in by morning. The fruit bowl migrated an inch or two along the counter. Each individual thing was deniable. I denied them all, for a season, because the alternative was unbearable and also, frankly, because the corrections were things HE would have done. My husband tidied the way other people breathe.

He died two years ago. I live alone, in the house we shared, and I am not a fanciful woman — I ran a laboratory for thirty years; I believe in controls and confounds.

So I ran controls. I photographed the kitchen each night before bed. I marked the fruit bowl's position in pencil. I put a single dried lentil balanced on the door handle to the hall, a tell-tale that would fall if anyone passed. The photographs caught the changes — mug rotated, chair tucked, bowl moved to its 'correct' spot two inches over — and the lentil never once fell, and the doors stayed locked, and I live alone, and the changes kept coming, gentle and domestic and unbearably familiar.

I could have lived inside that ambiguity forever. Then came the morning of the table.

Our kitchen table is a heavy oak farmhouse thing; it took two delivery men and a lot of swearing to place it. I came down to find it rotated a full ninety degrees — the long side now facing the window, the way HE always said it should go, the way I'd refused to arrange it for the eleven years we'd argued about it because I liked it facing the door. Rotated in the night. In a locked house. Alone. The chairs tucked neatly around it in its new, wrong, HIS orientation.

I sat on the floor and laughed and cried in a way that frightened the cat.

I've left the table where he put it. It faces the window now. It's better there, actually — the light in the mornings is lovely, and I should have listened eleven years ago. I leave a chair pulled out for myself, and every morning it's pushed in, and every morning I say, 'All right, all right, you were right about the table too.' The mugs I now leave handle-out on purpose. It saves him the trip.