Surely she was sick of this old man anyway. She had watched over him after their beloved Marie had passed away and he’d moved back to Chicago six years earlier, after failing at restaurant after restaurant across the Midwest. Once Marie and he had been ringers: Plant the two of them in a strip mall in any town and they could transform an empty restaurant into a successful enterprise, usually called the Golden Dragon, sometimes the Lotus Inn, and every once in a while New China Cuisine, which Kenneth disliked because he thought it had less character but Marie appreciated because of its efficiency.
They didn’t pick the names; Marie’s father did. He funded their start-up costs with his partners, and when they had built a solid base, he replaced them with less experienced chefs and sent them to the next location. They had left a trail of cities behind them: Cincinnati, Kansas City, Bloomington, Milwaukee, on and on, until Anna hit adolescence and begged them to pick a city and stay there. And so they picked Madison, where Kenneth was charmed by the pleasant academics who became their regulars and Marie admired the community’s strong sense of responsibility to the environment. Kenneth did not like the cold winters or the drunken buffoons at the fraternities who harassed his deliverymen, but he had to admit that it was a pretty city, green and serene during the summers, and a nice place to raise a child. They lived there for five years, and then Anna went to art school in Chicago, and then Kenneth got the itch to move; he had enjoyed their life on the road. But Marie wanted to stay.
Kenneth said, “Is this it? Will we just live and die in Madison?”
Marie, fine-boned, clearheaded, not a fighter, said quietly, “There are worse places to spend the rest of your life.”
“What about Cincinnati again?” he said. “Six months in Cincy. You liked it there.”
She had not minded Cincinnati, it was true. There was a good bookstore there, and it was clean and safe, and they had enjoyed getting ice cream from Graeter’s on Sunday nights, the three of them, Kenneth, Marie, and little Anna, the ice-cream cone almost as big as her head, it seemed. That had been fifteen years before, though.
“Why go back to where we have already been?” she said.
They moved to Louisville, where they had convinced Marie’s father to open a restaurant in the Highlands neighborhood, on Baxter, where all the foot traffic was. They liked having a lively clientele. They bumped up their prices. They named it Song Cuisine, and they knocked down a wall and cleaned out a back room, and on the weekends local musicians came and played their guitars and sang. They were forty-five years old, and it was like they were twenty-two again, only they had never been twenty-two in the first place because they had always been working, and then they were parents and were already old. They had never had so much fun before. Anna came and stayed with them during winter break and said she didn’t recognize them. “Who are you, and what have you done with my parents?” she said. Anna stayed out late one night drinking with a singer from Nashville passing through on his way to a show in New York City, and Kenneth found himself trusting his daughter like he had not before. He merely laughed when he heard her stumbling in late, cursing, and then shushing herself. The next morning he teased her about it. They were all growing into something new together. Madison was not it, but maybe Louisville was.
In a year Marie was dead from a cancer so rare there weren’t even any experimental drugs to use, not that Kenneth would have wanted her to try them anyway. It was enough that she was going through chemotherapy. Marie had been born and raised in America. She believed in Western medicine because that was what she had always known. He thought otherwise, but he could not talk her out of it, so instead he tried to heal her with food. He cooked every meal for her day and night, using the herbs he had been raised to believe could heal her. Turmeric and red clover and ginger. When she no longer had an appetite, he brewed her tea with barbed skullcap. Anna took a semester off from art school and came to Kentucky to watch her mother die. They sat on either side of Marie and held her hands when she passed away. They were silent, and then they were sobbing. There was nothing left of Marie but a faded white shell of flesh.