I am holding the kitchen. I have always held the kitchen. The cast iron pan on the stove, forty years of it, heavier every time someone tells me it is seasoned, though seasoning has no weight and I would know. The flour in the tin. The tin on the shelf. The shelf pressed down onto its brackets, the brackets into the wall, the wall into the ground, the ground onto me. I hold the whole line of it.
I hold her too. She is bent forward over the counter, palms flat, rolling something thin, and I feel every pound of her settle into her feet through the worn spot on the linoleum where she has stood ten thousand mornings. She leans on me now more than she used to. I have not minded. That is the one thing I do.
I hold the coffee in the cup, level, patient, the way I keep all liquids from wandering off. I hold the photographs stuck to the cold white box, and the little magnets that hold the photographs, and I hold the box.
There is one thing I cannot find. She said the kitchen felt empty since he passed. I measured it. The kitchen weighs exactly what it did. Nothing left. And still she stands heavier than her body, some load I cannot locate anywhere on my scale, pressing down through those same two feet. I have checked her a thousand times. There is more coming down through her than the numbers allow.
I do not understand it. But I understand my work. Whatever she is carrying that I cannot see, I am under it. I am under her.
I will not let go.