Emma's Table by Philip Galanes

recipe—every step exactly like the last time, that last time precisely like the time before. Her results were phenomenal, of course; anyone would be thrilled to give a dinner like Emma Sutton—except for Emma Sutton, it turned out. She wanted things more dependably perfect than they ever turned out to be: the roast cooked to medium rare after precisely eighteen minutes a pound, the potatoes browned to golden after just so many minutes more. But cooking wasn’t like that, she’d found, so she was obliged to look and look and look.
    Of course, oven lights should have changed all that—letting her look all she liked without troubling the meat at all.
    Well, they didn’t, she thought, a little harshly.
    She turned away from her roasting pork and took stock of her exquisite kitchen—as if to verify she really was a million miles and thirty years from her mother’s little Cape in North Adams, Massachusetts—that squeaky old oven door.
    She wasn’t satisfied at all.
    â€œThat blue ,” she groaned, the failure vibrating deep within her. Nothing she ever made, or built—no matter how wonderful to the rest of the world—ever seemed to satisfy her. She could never seem to make things turn out right.
    Emma knew that oven lights weren’t the problem.
    Still it’s all worked out, she thought—or mostly it had. She turned back to the oven again. Emma considered her husband, Bobby—her ex-husband, she reminded herself, for nearly fifteen years at this point. They’d married young, when she was just finishing at Smith College and he was a brand-new lawyer in town. They’d grown up together, really. They were married for twenty years, and no matter how troubled their marriage was—and it was troubled, of course, Emma knew that—she would no more have thought of divorcing him than she would have thought of divorcing her arms and legs, or breaking up her collection of stainless roasting pans—sized small, medium, and large.
    They went together, and at a certain point, Emma just assumed that her marriage was forever.
    But forever comes and goes, she knew now.
    She’d been stunned when he walked out on her—all those years before—his clichéd little valise in hand. It hadn’t even occurred to her that all their bickering could come tosuch drastic ends. And how furious she was: she could have pulled every hair straight out of her head, like handfuls of weeds from a messy garden, her lustrous brown hanks in two clenched fists.
    Such a long time ago, she thought, trying to settle herself down.
    They’d been divorced by now for nearly as long as they’d been married—which made Bobby’s recent reappearance even more surprising.
    Emma looked back into the oven one more time, bending forward slightly at the waist, her knees straight inside soft flannel trousers. She brought her face down close to the oven door, her nose pressed up against the insulated glass. She felt the oven’s heat against her smooth cheeks. She studied the pork loin that was shimmering in the oven’s wavy heat—just two frosted lights, mounted onto the back wall, illuminating the scene. She scarcely saw the roast at first. It was all decor that caught her eye: the coarse peppercorns scattered around the meat, glinting like sequins on a black evening dress, the satiny shards of garlic that peeked out from all the tiny slits she’d cut into the roast. She looked practically starstruck in the reflection of the glass, like a teenage girl with a movie magazine in her lap.
    â€œSo beautiful,” she marveled—only to second-guess herself a moment later: Or does it look a little dry?
    Emma pulled the oven door open and slid the roasting pan forward on its silvery wire rack. She looked and looked, for such a long, long time that she seemed to lose her place entirely—that meat may as well have been an ancient artifact under museum glass, or