The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

The Skillet Goes In

I did not measure a single thing. That was what I was most afraid of, standing in his kitchen that late at night.

I was afraid my hands would not know what her hands had known. I was afraid I would get it wrong in the one place it mattered most.

But they knew. Somewhere in the cutting and the patting and the folding, my hands remembered what my head never learned.

I patted the dough out on his counter in the yellow lamp light with flour up past my wrists, the same as she used to.

I cut the rounds with the jelly glass I had brought from home, pressing straight down, never twisting, because twisting seals the edge and they will not rise.

I set them in the skillet edge to edge so they would lean on each other and hold each other up and reach for the top of the oven.

I put a thumb of butter on each pale top. I slid the whole skillet into his oven at four hundred and fifty. I shut the door and turned around.

Daddy was crying.

Not hard. Just sitting there at his own kitchen table with the tears running down into the gray stubble he had not bothered to shave in days.

He was watching the little oven light like it was a television showing him something he thought he would never get to see again.

“It smells like your mother,” he said.

“I know it does,” I said.

“I did not think I would smell that again in this house.” He wiped his face with the flat of his rough hand, embarrassed at himself. “I am sorry. Pay me no mind.”

I did not cross the room to hug him. I knew better than that. Some men you do not crowd when they finally break open.

You just stay in the room with them. You keep your hands busy and your voice easy and you let them know, without saying it, that you are not going anywhere.

So I wiped down his counter. I washed the crockery bowl in his sink. I stood in Mama’s kitchen with my daddy while the biscuits baked and the window went black with December.

Neither one of us said very much. It was the closest I had felt to her since the day in April we carried her out of that front room.

Twelve minutes. The timer on his stove was the same wind-up one Mama had always used, the little red tomato.

When it rang he flinched, and then he laughed a little at himself for flinching, and I reached in and pulled the skillet out with a folded towel.

The bottoms were dark gold. The tops were pale and soft. They had risen up tall and leaned together exactly the way hers always did, and my throat closed up looking at them.

I buttered the tops one more time. I set the skillet right down on a folded towel in the middle of his kitchen table, where we could both reach it.