The house on Franklin Street

"A friend loves at all times, and kinsfolk are born to share adversity." — Proverbs 17:17

Ray called tonight and I almost did not answer because I was washing the skillet and my hands were wet and I do not like picking up the phone with wet hands, which is not a thing a grown woman should admit in writing but there it is.

I dried my hands on the towel and picked up and said, "What."

That is how I talk to my brother. I said What and he said Hey and we were off, the way we have been off ten thousand times, because Ray and I do not need a runway. We do not need to warm up. We do not need to be careful. I am careful with Hannah every single time I open my mouth, and I am careful with Dan in a different way because Dan is careful with me and I am trying to match his register, and I love Becca without thinking about it, and I love Ray the way you love a person you could fight with in the kitchen at fourteen and sit next to at church at seventy-seven and the distance between those two things is absolutely nothing.

He called because he had been cleaning out the back bedroom and found a box of Mama's things. Not the good china or the cross necklace or anything I would have wanted — those came to me years ago. This was the other box. Recipe cards in Mama's handwriting, a pair of reading glasses with the earpiece taped, three church bulletins from the eighties with her name circled in the prayer list for reasons neither of us could figure, and a photograph of the kitchen in the house on Franklin Street that I had never seen.

I asked him to bring it over and he said he would come Thursday.

Ray is older than me and has been older than me my whole life, which sounds obvious but what I mean is that he was already a certain kind of person when I was still becoming one. He is retired and lives fifteen minutes from here and I see him most weeks and we talk about nothing and it is the best conversation I have all week, because nothing with Ray is not actually nothing. Nothing with Ray is the whole childhood sitting between us, the hardware store and the back porch and the sound Daddy made coming in the door at six o'clock, and we do not have to say any of it because we were both there.

The photograph is small and square with a white border and the colors are the colors of the nineteen-sixties. The kitchen is smaller than I remembered. The window is over the sink, the way I remembered.

There is a person in this world who remembers that window, and I called him What and he called me Hey and neither of us mentioned that we are the last two people alive who stood in that room.

We did not need to. That is what kinsfolk means.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.