Skyler did not know the combination. She stood in front of the pantry door, looking at the lock, and then she went back to her room and took a sleeve of saltines from the inside of a boot at the back of her closet, and ate six of them sitting on her bed, slowly, letting each one go soft on her tongue so it would last.
* * *
Her father was supposed to be home by four.
He was a Chesapeake Bay pilot, which was a job most people had never heard of, and which Skyler had explained so many times at school that she could do it in one breath: when a big ship came into the bay from the ocean, a cargo ship or a tanker or a car carrier the size of a building lying on its side, the captain was not allowed to steer it all the way up to Baltimore alone, because the bay was shallow and tricky and full of channels that moved, so a pilot climbed up a rope ladder on the side of the ship while it was still moving and took over and guided it in. It took hours. Sometimes it took all night. Then he got off and slept at the pilot station and waited for another ship going back out. He could be gone two days, or four. When she was little, her mother used to put a map of the bay on the refrigerator and let her move a magnet shaped like a sailboat along it to show where Daddy probably was.
The map was gone now. Celeste had redone the kitchen the first winter after she married him, white cabinets and a gray stone island and a refrigerator with a front so smooth you could not stick anything to it. Skyler did not think it had been on purpose, the refrigerator. She thought most of what Celeste did was not quite on purpose, or at least not on a purpose Celeste would have admitted to, even to herself. It was more that Celeste had a picture in her head of what her life was supposed to look like, and the picture was very clear and very clean, and Skyler did not fit inside the frame. So Celeste was always, gently and then not so gently, trimming the edges.
At first it had been small things. Celeste had come into their lives when Skyler was nine, two years after Skyler's mother died, and she had been nice in the way adults are nice when they are being watched. She brought presents. She said Skyler's drawings were wonderful. She asked about school. Skyler's father had been so tired back then, so gray around the edges, that when Celeste laughed at something he said at dinner, Skyler had seen his face change, as if a window had been opened in a room that had been shut up for a long time. She had wanted that for him. She had wanted it so badly that she had decided, at nine, to like Celeste whether she did or not.
After the wedding, the presents stopped, which was normal. Then the questions about school stopped, which was also probably normal. Then the dinners began to change.
It was hard to explain to anyone, because each individual thing sounded like nothing. Celeste was "watching what the household ate." Celeste did a lot of the cooking now, when Skyler's father was away, and she cooked for herself: salmon, salads with nuts and goat cheese, steak once a week, sushi brought home in a paper bag. For Skyler she made what she called "kid food," and then, after a while, she stopped making it and just told Skyler what was hers. A box of macaroni. A frozen burrito. Toast. "You're so picky," Celeste said, when Skyler had said once, carefully, that she liked salmon. "You told me last month you didn't." Skyler had not told her that. But Celeste said it with such certainty that Skyler almost wondered.
When her father was home, everything was different. There were real dinners, with all three of them at the table, and Celeste passed Skyler the bread and asked how her day was and laughed at her father's stories about Greek captains and Korean chief engineers and the time a pilot ladder had broken two rungs below his feet. On those nights Skyler ate until her stomach hurt, because she had learned that you ate when there was food, and she saw Celeste watching her do it, and later she heard Celeste say to her father, "Did you see how much she ate? That's what I mean. That's what I've been talking about. It's like she doesn't know when to stop."
Then her father would leave for the bay again, and the bottom shelf would come back.
* * *