Emma's Table by Philip Galanes Page A

a bumpy rock from the surface of the moon.
    Who knows? she admitted, finally. What wouldn’t look dry roasting in four hundred degrees of heat?
    So she basted the pork with a long-handled spoon, and saw, once it was moistened like that, that it was browning right on schedule, its skin just beginning to bubble up and crisp. Thank God, she thought, so gratefully—the timing of her roast some kind of heavenly mystery.
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    When they first sent Emma up to Rochester, New York, to the federal prison there, she was stunned when Bobby turned up—that very first week. “Just to visit,” he told her. She hadn’t seen him in years. And she was suspicious, of course—assumed that he’d only come to gloat.
    Emma was powerfully ashamed of herself.
    It was an awkward visit—not half an hour long, filled more with pauses than with talk. But he turned up again the very next week, and the week after that too; and little by little, they found a kind of easiness again—the rancor of their terrible split seemed nearly clownish, fighting for so long over quite so little.
    It didn’t take many more weeks of visiting for Emma to see that Bobby didn’t want her brought low.
    God knows what he did want, she thought—but it wasn’t that.
    There weren’t many other visitors either, she had to admit. But every week brought another visit from Bobby, all through her prison stretch and the home confinement too; and on his very last visit, on the very last day, Bobby asked her to marry him again.
    Such a fool, she thought—shaking her head at the memory of it, but not quite keeping a smile from her lips either.She took the proposal itself as a vindication of sorts: an admission that he’d been wrong to leave her all those years before. Emma felt relieved at her exoneration—on that count at least. She could use the opportunity to rewrite history, and she had to admit, she loved her husband still.
    She suggested that he move back in with her instead—which he did, nearly six months before, right into the new apartment on Park and Seventy-first.
    Emma gazed down into the roasting pan.
    It was then she noticed the vegetables that were scattered around the meat—the carrots and potatoes and leeks—all hapless and thoroughly uncooked. She sighed through slightly parted lips, tamping down the fire of culinary pride. Her vegetables were greasy with olive oil and littered with spices—like sticky skin at a public beach. Not done at all, she saw, excavating deep into the roasting pan with her long-handled spoon, praying for brown edges on the underside: no such luck.
    She checked the temperature knob and then her wristwatch: same cooking time, same heat—but definitely not the same. She didn’t need her mother to tell her that she wasn’t helping matters, keeping the oven door open like that, staring down into the open roaster while the oven’s precious heat tumbled all around the room. But she couldn’t bear to close the oven door either. Not yet, she thought—not until she’d worked out some kind of salvage plan for her meal.
    She stood stock-still for a moment.
    â€œDamn that Melora,” she spat.
    She felt her body sizzling with heat, as if she were roasting too—hissing like a snake on desert sand. Emma had made her diagnosis. There were too many vegetables. She’d nearly doubled the number she put in the roaster, trying to accommodate Benjamin’s girlfriend and her ridiculous vegan diet.
    That’s got to be it, she thought, gazing down at her failure-in-progress, simmering in the juices of her own annoyance.
    Emma pushed the roaster back into the oven. She felt like slamming the door behind it. I suppose I can take the pork out first, she thought—exhaling long—and let the vegetables cook a little longer.
    She felt her neck relaxing.
    That might work, she thought.
    She shook her head at Melora’s foolishness, at