The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen
Christmas Night In His House
I went back the very next night, which was still Christmas, late, after I saw on the family group that Reva’s car was long gone from the drive.
I called the house first so the headlights in his yard would not scare him. An old man alone in the country gets uneasy about lights at night.
“Dana?” he said when he opened the door. He had his cardigan pulled on over his pajama shirt. His feet were in the slippers Mama bought him two Christmases back.
“It is near ten o’clock, honey,” he said. “Everything all right?”
“Everything is fine, Daddy,” I said. I had a grocery sack in each arm. “I came to make you something. Go on and sit down.”
His kitchen looked exactly the same as always and completely different at the same time, if that makes any sense.
Her apron still hung on its nail by the door. Her handwriting was still on the calendar on the wall, her blue ink, doctor appointments penciled in by a woman who was already gone.
I set the sacks down on the counter. I took out the flour and the buttermilk and the lard, and I took out my black skillet wrapped in its towel, and I set it on his stove.
“What in the world are you doing,” he said. But he was already easing himself down into a chair at the table, and something in his face had started to come loose.
“Making biscuits,” I said. “Mama’s. You sit there and keep me company.”
He sat. The gold-wrapped phone was still on the table where he had left it the night before. It was out of the box now, a charging cord running to the wall outlet.
He looked at it a long second. Then he reached over and pushed it gently to the far edge of the table, out of the way, without one word about it.
I put the flour into Mama’s big crockery mixing bowl, the cream-colored one with the blue stripe. I had brought it from my house in the bottom of the second sack.
I cut the lard in with two of his table knives the way she always did, and then I finished it with my fingers, and the kitchen went quiet except for that soft sound.