The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

The Morning Call

My phone rang at seven the next morning. It was the house line. The landline. Daddy’s number, the one I have known by heart since I was big enough to reach the wall phone.

It was not Reva’s cell number. It was not the glass phone that could video-call the grandbabies any time he wanted.

It was the old black rotary on the wall by his refrigerator. The one Mama used to stretch the cord on clear into the pantry so she could gossip in private.

“Dana,” he said. “How did your mother make the gravy.”

I sat down on the edge of my bed. Out the window it was just getting light over the bare soybean ground, that flat gray December light we get out here that is not quite day yet.

“The sausage gravy,” I said. “For the biscuits.”

“I got two left,” he said. “I been sitting here looking at them since five o’clock. I want to do it right. The way she did it. With the drippings.”

His voice caught and broke a little on the line. “I cannot call her and ask her, Dana.”

“No,” I said. “But you can call me.”

So I told him. I told him to brown the sausage first in the skillet and leave every bit of the grease.

To sprinkle the flour right down into the hot drippings and stir it with a fork until it smelled like toast coming up off the pan.

To pour the milk in slow, a little at a time, stirring the whole while and never once walking away from that stove.

And plenty of black pepper, I told him. More than you think. More than seems right. That was the secret, the only one Mama ever had.

I heard him set the phone down on the counter. I heard the skillet scrape across the burner. I heard him stirring, slow and careful.

I stayed on the line the whole time, nine miles away in my bedroom, telling my seventy-one-year-old daddy how to feed himself breakfast.

He did not call Reva. I thought about that for a long while after we finally hung up.

He had the eleven-hundred-dollar way to reach every soul in the family sitting right there on his table. And he reached for the old wall phone instead.

He called the daughter who had stood in his kitchen at ten at night with flour dried up past her wrists. I do not say that to be proud. I say it because it is true and it still undoes me.