Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

Robert stood inside the kitchen of the lodge’s family residence. Beside him, Sophie stared at everything with wide eyes. The room was smaller than Robert remembered it, the ceilings lower and the counters and appliances worn with age. But the floors had been recently swept and although the place was dimly lit by a low-wattage bulb dangling overhead, at least there were no cobwebs anywhere. Robert set his grocery bags on the scarred kitchen table and made the rounds of the cupboards, finding the familiar dishes of his childhood where they had always been and a few new coffee mugs among the old chipped tea cups. The drawers beneath the kitchen counter contained the same old silverware from long ago, now worn smooth, as well as wooden spoons, spatulas, and a few knives that could probably use a whetstone.

“Why don’t you check the pantry?” he told Sophie, so she would have something useful to do. He pointed to a small door set into a wall.

Sophie unlatched the hook closure and peeked inside. “Cans,” she said.

“What else?”

“That’s all. Just cans.”

Robert came and looked. Beans, soup, tomato paste, peaches, but no sacks of flour, no boxes of crackers or pasta. Well, Arthur had been a bachelor and probably got all his meals at the store. Or if there had been anything like cookies or cornmeal in the pantry, they had probably gone bad by now and been thrown out by Norma or whoever she had hired to tidy up. “We’ll check the dates on those cans tomorrow,” he said. “As for anything else we need, we can get it from the store. It’s best we start fresh, anyway.”

He went to the small ammonia-cooled refrigerator and found it empty, thank goodness, since anything inside would have surely rotted by now. Someone had unplugged it and he considered plugging it back in but then decided it would be best to wait and see how much power the solar panels were generating these days. They could manage without a refrigerator, but going without electric lights would be a hardship, what with his love of late-night reading.

“Let’s take a look at the rest of the apartment,” he told Sophie.

From the kitchen, a short hallway led to a sitting room with a stained sofa and a coffee table that seen better days. On a table by the window was a radio in a cracked plastic case, and along the walls were shelf after shelf of books. On one wall hung a large oblong screen that Sophie gazed at in curiosity.

“A television,” her father told her. “In my parents’ time, you could watch shows on it, kind of like watching a play, except you didn’t have to actually be at the theater to see it. By the time I was a kid you could only watch a show if it had been recorded onto a disc. He showed her a shelf full of small flat boxes. “The DVD player quit working when I was in my teens, so I don’t know why Arthur never got rid of any of this stuff. Nostalgia, I guess. It’s a common affliction around here.”

Sophie’s face wore a puzzled frown but she asked no questions. No doubt she was saving them up for a later date. Right now there were so many things to be curious about that she was probably overwhelmed.

From this room, a steep flight of stairs led to a second story with three small bedrooms and a bathroom. Robert glanced inside each room in turn. Finding them as well-dusted and tidy as the rooms downstairs, he took the largest room for himself, and gave Sophie her choice of the others. “This one used to be mine,” he said, showing her a room full of books, with a narrow bed and a window that looked out toward the mountains. “Arthur’s was the one across the hall. It’s slightly bigger and has a view of the street.”

“I’d rather see the mountains,” Sophie said.

Robert wasn’t a bit surprised. “Well, now that we’ve got that settled, let’s bring in the rest of our things so we can put the horses in the stable and start getting supper ready.”

Bringing in their packs didn’t take long and Robert told his daughter to leave any dirty clothes she had in the hall hamper. “Hopefully the laundry facilities in the lodge are still up and running,” he said. “We never had anything like that in this apartment because we didn’t need it. We didn’t really need a kitchen either, technically speaking, because the lodge has its own, but cooking is something you sometimes want to do as a family.”

Once the horses were curried, put into box stalls and given fresh hay, they washed up at the kitchen sink and then spread out their groceries on the kitchen table. “Chicken, rice and beans,” Robert said. “That’s a pretty easy meal.” He handed the can of beans to Sophie. The can opener is in that drawer over there, and the saucepans are in the cabinet underneath. You get that ready, and I’ll light the stove.”

It took him a few tries, since he was out of practice, but soon Robert had a healthy blue flame on one of the propane stove’s front burners. He turned to tell Sophie to put the beans on the burner, but then realized that she was still peering into the drawer full of kitchen implements.

“Do you know what a can opener looks like?” he asked.

Sophie shook her head. “I don’t know how to cook.”

Of course she didn’t. There was never any need to cook at Northwind. Diana would sometimes get in the kitchen of their small cottage and turn out a meal or a dessert for a special occasion, but preparing one’s own food on a regular basis was a needless waste of time and money when they could have all they wanted for free.

“Well,” Robert said, “I guess it’s time you learned.”