Eleven Girls on a Trailer Floor

Cinnamon rolls at midnight

At eleven thirty my mother clapped her hands twice in the kitchen doorway, and eleven girls sat up in their sleeping bags like prairie dogs.

“Wash your hands,” she said. “All of you. With soap. Sing the birthday song twice.”

They lined up in the narrow hall to my bathroom, eleven girls in pajamas, singing happy birthday to nobody in particular, and I heard Addison sing it a little louder than the others.

Mom had cleared my kitchen table and floured the whole top of it. The dough had risen up out of that crockery bowl and lifted the dish towel like a tent. She punched it down with one fist, and eleven girls gasped like she’d done a magic trick.

“My mother taught me this,” Mom said, “in a farmhouse kitchen out by Attica, on a table about this size. I was ten years old. She said a girl who can make cinnamon rolls will never be without friends, and she was right.”

She cut the dough into pieces with a butter knife, one piece for each girl, and she showed them how to roll it out with a drinking glass when we ran out of rolling pins.

“Butter first,” she said, going around with the soft butter. “All the way to the edges. Don’t be stingy. Stingy rolls are dry rolls.”

Then the cinnamon and brown sugar, out of an old coffee can, a big handful for each girl. Then she showed them how to roll it up tight, like a sleeping bag, she said, and every girl in that kitchen laughed.

I stood in the doorway and watched my mother’s hands. They are seventy years old. They cleaned other people’s bathtubs for thirty-one years, and they are knotted at the knuckles, and they still move over a ball of dough like they’re playing piano.

She put her hands right over Addison’s on the dough and helped her roll it tight. Addison’s mother had never made a cinnamon roll in her life, Addison said. They always got them from the bakery in Wichita.

“Well,” Mom said, “now you’ll know how. And you can teach her.”

Kaylee and Addison rolled theirs together, side by side, so the two rolls would bake touching. Kaylee said that way they’d pull apart into one big one.

Mom cut every roll with a piece of thread, the old way, which the girls thought was the most amazing thing they’d ever seen.

Then she set the pans on top of the stove with the oven warming underneath, covered them with towels, and made eleven girls sit on the floor for thirty minutes and wait.

Nobody fell asleep. Not one.

At twenty-five to one the front door opened and Ryan came in from the plant in his work boots, smelling like cutting oil and cold air.

He stopped dead and looked at the living room. Every sleeping bag was empty, every girl was sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor in a big circle around my mother, and the Christmas lights were still glowing on the ceiling.

“Well,” Ryan said. “I see the party’s in the kitchen.”

Kaylee jumped up and hugged him around the middle, and I watched Ryan see Addison over her shoulder. He looked at me, and I gave him a little nod, and he just said, “Evening, Addison. Glad you made it.”