The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

Four Biscuits

He ate four.

He ate them the way he had eaten them every Sunday of my whole life. Split open with both thumbs, steam rolling off the torn middle, butter melting down into it.

He closed his eyes on that first bite and he kept them closed a long, long time, and I let him have the quiet.

“That is them,” he said finally. His voice was thick. “That is exactly them. How in the world did you.”

“I watched her my whole life,” I said. “I just never knew I was learning it until I had to.”

He ate the second one slower. The gold phone sat dark at the edge of the table the entire time, and he did not look at it once.

Partway through the third biscuit he said, not looking up from his plate, “Your sister means well, you know.”

“I know she does, Daddy.”

“She does not know how to be sad,” he said. “She never has. Her mother was the same way, bless them both.”

He turned the fourth biscuit over in his thick fingers. “Buy a thing. Fix a thing. Stay busy and keep moving. That is how those two love a person.”

“You got my sitting-still half,” he said. “You always did, from a baby. You could sit in a hard thing. Reva has to run from it.”

I had never once thought of it that way. That there were two halves in me, and I had gotten the half that could sit inside a grief without bolting from the room.

I have thought about it nearly every day since that night.

We did not say one bad word about Reva at that table. That mattered to me, and it would have mattered more to Mama, who would not abide her girls running each other down.

I was not there to win anything off my sister. I was there to feed my father on the worst Christmas of his whole life. And I had done it.

When he finished the fourth biscuit he sat back in his chair. He put his hand flat on his chest and let out a long breath.

It was a breath that sounded like it had been held all the way since April, finally let go in a warm kitchen that smelled like his wife.

“Leave the pan,” he said.

“Daddy, that is my cornbread skillet, I need it back for the”

“Leave the pan, Dana.” He said it soft, but it was not a question and it was not a request. “I want it to stay out on that stove. I want to see it sitting there.”

So I left it. My twenty-five-dollar skillet, black and plain and crusted with Mama’s recipe, right in the middle of his cold stovetop.

Right where Mama’s own skillet used to sit for fifty years, before it came to live at my house and I did not even know why I had wanted it so bad.