Alas-Singko Kwarenta y Uno

The light arrives at the kitchen window at 5:41, give or take the season, and Corazon is there to receive it, as she has been every morning for thirty-one years, the way one meets a guest who has grown too old to knock.

She does not turn on the bulb. The bulb is for emergencies and Decembers. This hour belongs to the blue light that comes before the gold light, the one that makes the kitchen look underwater and makes Corazon, sixty-two, look like the photograph of her mother that hangs in the sala pretending to be a saint.

Kettle. Match. The ring of blue flame, which is the kitchen answering the window: we also have dawn in here, we make it ourselves.

On the table, the list her granddaughter left, in handwriting that gets more like Corazon's every year though neither of them will say so: baon for Thursday, no cucumber PLEASE, love you, the please underlined three times and the love not underlined at all, because the girl underlines only what she doubts will be granted.

Corazon slices the cucumber. She is not being cruel. She is being sixty-two, and she knows things about lunches and about doubt that cannot be explained, only packed.

The rice sighs in the pot. The first tricycle of the day goes by with its cargo of one nurse, headed for the six o'clock shift, and Corazon lifts two fingers off the counter toward the window — not quite a wave, more an acknowledgment between institutions.

Her husband, when he was alive, called this hour her office hours. He was not wrong. The bills are thought about here, and the daughters, and the son in Dubai whose calls come at strange hours shaped by other people's clocks. The kitchen holds what the house cannot say in daylight; that is what kitchens are for, and why they are given the first light as payment.

At 6:10 the gold arrives, replacing the blue without ceremony, and the kitchen becomes ordinary again — becomes counters and a calendar and a jar of spoons. Corazon takes the garlic down. The day may begin now. She has decided to allow it.

Upstairs, an alarm goes off, is silenced, goes off again with the wounded persistence of alarms. Chairs will scrape soon. Doors. The great clumsy orchestra of a family surfacing.

Corazon sets four plates, then, after a pause that has a name she does not use, a fifth — because today is the second of the month, and on the second of the month, for reasons the kitchen keeps, her sister always comes to breakfast, and has not missed one yet, in the eleven years since she died.