The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

The Phone On The Table

The living room was warm and the tree was crooked the way it always was, and I was watching Daddy’s hands when my sister ruined it.

He was sitting in Mama’s chair because he could not sit in his own that year. I understood that without him saying it. We all did.

The wrapping paper was already a pile at his feet. He had opened the socks I knitted and the jar of apple butter he liked, and he had held each small thing a beat too long.

That is what grief does to a man’s hands. It makes him slow. It makes him hold everything like it might be the last one anybody ever gives him.

Then Reva stood up from the couch with a box the size of a hardback book. It was wrapped in gold paper that cost more than what was inside most of our gifts.

“Daddy,” she said, “this one is from me.”

He took it slow. His reading glasses were down on his nose. He worked a finger under the tape instead of tearing it.

He did that because Mama always saved the paper, smoothed it flat and folded it in the hall closet for next year, and he still thought the way she thought.

It was a phone. Not a phone like the one he had, the little flip one he kept in his shirt pocket and never charged. It was the new kind. The big glass kind.

It was the kind that costs eleven hundred dollars before you even buy the case to go around it.

I knew the exact price because I had priced that same phone in October when mine cracked. I had stood in the store and held it and put it back. I bought the sixty-dollar one instead.

Daddy turned it over in his hands like it might break if he breathed wrong on it. “Reva,” he said, “this is too much. We said twenty-five.”

“We did,” she said.

She was smiling, but it was the smile she uses when she wants the whole room to look at her instead of at anything else.

“Some of us still love him the regular amount,” she said.

That was the sentence. She said it light, like a little joke, and she looked right at me while she said it.

The regular amount. As if love came priced in dollars, and mine had come up short at the register, and now everybody could see the receipt.