The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

The Drive Home

I did not say one word in that living room. I want that on the record, same as the rest.

I could have stood up off that couch and told my sister exactly what I thought of her regular amount. I had the words loaded and the breath to throw them.

But it was Daddy’s first Christmas as a widower. I was not going to let the last thing that happened in his living room that night be his two grown daughters tearing at each other over him.

He had buried his wife. He did not need to referee a fight on top of it.

So I hugged him at the door a little longer than I usually do. I told him I loved him. I told him I would see him soon.

Then I drove the nine miles home on dark county roads with my jaw clenched so tight it was aching by the time I passed my own mailbox.

Jeff had stayed back with our two because the baby was running a fever. He took one look at my face when I walked in and said, “What did she do.”

I told him. The gold box. The eleven hundred dollars. The regular amount, said out loud in front of Daddy and God and everybody.

I heard how small it sounded when I said it at my own counter with my coat still on. And I cried anyway. I could not help it.

“She is grieving, Dana,” Jeff said. He is a kinder person than I am by a good stretch. “People do ugly things when they are grieving.”

“I know she is grieving,” I said. “I know exactly why she did it. That is the part that makes it worse, not better.”

I could not sleep that night. I lay there in the dark and listened to the furnace kick on and off.

I thought about Daddy alone in that farmhouse with his glass phone and his crooked tree and his dead wife’s handwriting still up on the wall calendar.

The first full year of his life with no woman in that kitchen. Seventy-one years old and nobody to cook for him or fuss at him.

And then I thought about the kitchen itself. About Mama’s kitchen. About the one single thing in the whole world I could give him that Reva could not buy in any store for any amount of money.

What Mama Left In The Kitchen

Mama made biscuits every Sunday of my entire life, and most Saturdays besides, and sometimes on a Tuesday for no reason at all.

She made them in a cast-iron skillet older than me. A ten-inch Lodge, gone black and slick from fifty years of hands and grease and fire.

She made them the same way every single time. By hand. By feel. There was never once a recipe written down anywhere in that house.

Self-rising flour. Cold buttermilk out of the carton. A lump of lard about the size of an egg. Her two hands did all the rest of it.

She would cut the lard in with two table knives first, and then finish it with her fingers, working fast until the flour looked like coarse meal.

She never let the dough warm up. Cold hands, cold buttermilk, cold lard, she always said, or you will have hockey pucks instead of biscuits.