The Bedroom I Asked For

Now we were two women in a small brick house with nothing to do after supper but talk.

She told me about the sewing room in 1975, when there was no air conditioning and the girls kept wet rags on the backs of their necks.

She told me about meeting Dale at a square dance at the armory. She told me Ronnie had been afraid of the dark until he was eleven.

I told her about the scheduling job, which nobody in the family had ever asked me about. She asked me real questions.

How do you know which machine to put a big order on? What happens when a yarn shipment is late?

“I never knew you were the one who decided all that,” she said. “I thought you sat in an office and answered the phone.”

“Most people do,” I said.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have asked twenty years ago.”

On Saturday morning, I came into the kitchen and found her with the big wooden bowl out on the table and a sack of White Lily flour and the buttermilk.

“Wash your hands and take your rings off,” she said. “I’m going to show you the biscuits.”

Everybody in the Whitfield family knows about Faye’s biscuits. Ronnie’s aunt has asked for that recipe for forty years.

Faye’s sister asked for it on her deathbed, as a joke, and Faye still wouldn’t give it to her.

“I never wrote it down for anybody,” Faye said. “My mama never wrote it down for me. She showed me in this bowl when I was nine years old, standing on a chair.”

She put my hands in the flour. She showed me how much shortening by the feel of it, how to cut it in with my fingertips and not my palms, because your palms are too warm.

She showed me how to make a well and pour the buttermilk in.

“How much buttermilk?” I asked.

“You don’t measure it,” she said. “You listen to it. When the dough stops sounding wet and starts sounding soft, you stop. Here. Listen.”

I listened. I’ll be honest, the first time I didn’t hear a thing. The second batch, I think I did.

She stood behind me while I patted the dough out and cut the biscuits with an old juice glass, the way her mama had.

She put her hand over mine on the glass, the same way she’d put her hand over mine on the suitcase handle at the door.

“There,” she said. “Now somebody knows. I was afraid I’d be the last one.”

I had flour to my elbows and I started crying right there over the bowl, and she didn’t say anything.

She just handed me a dish towel and put the pan in the oven and set the timer.

“You’ll make these for Kaylee,” she said. “And she’ll make them for hers. That’s how it goes.”

I want to say clearly that through that whole week, Faye never once said a word against her son to me. She never made excuses for him either.

When I was angry, she let me be angry. When I said something hard about him, she nodded and said, “That’s fair.”

But she was angry too. I could see it. She’d go quiet in the middle of washing a dish and stand there with her hands in the water.