They had painted the walls of the kitchen, and the little dining room onto which it opened, a pale yellow, when I was seven or eight, before my last brother was born.

On the left, a worn gas range, flanked by narrow counters of light blue Formica, covered in a clutter of bottles and tins, the hairy smell of fried meat.

High on the back wall of the kitchen, my father had made an open shelf from a white door slab, the place for the many things we shouldn’t touch, bug spray, bleach—there my mother kept her nerve medicine, for the pains in her chest that brought tears. Four children in the house by the time I was five—but I understood, even then, perhaps I was told, the pain was from sadness.

On the right side of the kitchen, a dishwasher that had stopped working around the time they painted the walls, above that, a dish drain we used instead, and the double sink, and in the enamel on the lip of one of the sinks, a chip in the shape of a bird, over which I would place my thumb.

A small window reflected a dark image back at night as you stood before the sink. To the right of the window, a fire extinguisher and some plastic flowers that my mother called Indian blankets hung on the side of a cabinet. On the left side, a rack of hangers, holding plastic rosaries from school and woven trivets.

A small ceramic vase, its neck as wide as a finger, striped in yellow and blue and brown, with the word Poland stamped on the bottom, sat on the window ledge. I hoped my mother would let me have it when I grew up and moved away. Beside the vase, a miniature wooden cabin with a porch. Out of the cabin’s door a spider had cast a funneling web. My mother fed it flies.