The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

She would pat it out on the counter. Not roll it. Pat it, gentle, with the flats of her fingers, maybe three-quarters of an inch thick.

She cut the rounds with the same jelly glass her own mother had used before her. An old Golden Harvest glass with a scalloped rim.

She set them in that skillet edge to edge, touching, crowded, so they had to rise up tall instead of spreading out flat.

Four hundred and fifty degrees in the oven. A thumb of butter on the top of each one going in, and another thumb on each when they came out.

The bottoms would come out dark gold and crisp. The tops would be pale and soft and torn-looking. Daddy ate four of them every Sunday for forty years running.

When we cleaned out Mama’s kitchen in the heat of that summer, Reva took the good china and the stand mixer and the pretty things.

I took the jelly glass and the skillet. Reva actually laughed and said I was welcome to the junk, honey, you always did like the junk.

I did not argue with her. I just wrapped that black skillet in a dish towel and carried it out to my car like it was made of glass.

I had that skillet in my own kitchen now, and I had learned to use it the hard way, which is the only way worth anything.

I had stood next to Mama a hundred times and half-watched her hands and never really learned it. You never think you need to. You think she is always going to be standing there.

Then she was gone, and I had to learn it the way she had learned it, from the feel of the dough and nothing else, getting it wrong a dozen times first.

My own everyday skillet, the one I had bought for my own house years back and used for cornbread, had cost me twenty-five dollars at the farm store out on the bypass.

I knew that price too. Twenty-five dollars, on sale, a plain new Lodge. The exact same amount we had all agreed Daddy was worth this Christmas.

So that was the whole plan, lying there at two in the morning staring at the ceiling.

I would make Mama’s biscuits in Daddy’s own kitchen. In my twenty-five-dollar skillet. The night after Christmas, once everybody else had gone home and left him alone.