by Jen Nails
“What’s the matter, honey?” she asked.
“It’s Christmas, and I want to go home,” said Mom. Helen put her arms around her. “Come on,” Helen said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” She got Mom up, and they headed down the hallway. Nina got out her phone right away and called Denise, and I watched a little boy slap one of the residents about a hundred high fives.
Helen came and told us we could probably go ahead and be on our way soon. “Don’t let today worry you,” she said. “Holidays always put people in a funk around here.” She straightened her hat, and the little white ball on the end bounced around. “But don’t sweat it,” she said. “She’ll be all right.”
Mom came back out in new clothes, and after a little more hanging out and doing word scrambles, we gave them their gifts. Helen opened her candle, and Mom opened her word search puzzle books. Being there with Mom today made me sad, and I felt mean, but I really wanted to get back to the gnocchi. I had a good feeling about those gnocchi, my very first on-my-own-cooked pasta meal.
When we got home later, Dad’s bedroom door was open, and his damp towel hung in the bathroom. But Dad wasn’t there.
Jean had come in with us to see our tree and said, “Oh goodness, you’ve done it again, Steffany.” I showed her all the gnocchi, and she put down the other coffee cake that she’d baked for us.
“I bet you can’t stay,” I said.
“Hon, it’s the same old story at the Sawyers’: cooking for a million people. Uncle Bennet’s up from Raleigh, the Padgets are down from Charlottesville. You name ’em, we’ve got ’em. If you hadn’t gone to town in your own kitchen, you and your dad and Nina’d be coming over, too. But listen, y’all are gonna have a great Christmas this year. I know it,” she said. And after a big squeeze, she was gone.
I turned on the tree lights and Frank Sinatra’s holiday hits. I was stirring the sauce when Nina came into the kitchen.
“Okay,” she said, “Denise’s mom just invited us for Christmas.”
“That’s so nice,” I said. “Maybe on another holiday we could go.”
“Well, I was kind of thinking we should go,” said Nina.
“What?”
“Stef . . . let’s just go. It’ll be fun. Denise actually has a trampoline in her backyard.”
“So?” I said. “Dad’s coming back soon, and we’re having gnocchi. That we made.”
“Stef,” she said. She looked around the kitchen and lifted her hands in the air. “I don’t know where Dad is. Do you?”
“No.”
“If we go to Denise’s, we won’t be by ourselves on Christmas.”
“We’re not by ourselves. We’re with each other.”
“Steffany, you don’t get it. Dad doesn’t want to be here. He never did.” She started texting. Then her phone rang. Before I could say anything, she was on the phone telling Denise we’d actually love to take her up on that, and thank you.
“Wait,” I said. “Nina.” She was still talking and waved me away. “Nina!”
She got up off the bar stool and walked into the living room. I followed her.
“I’m not going,” I mouthed to her. She held up one finger while she finished talking. Then she hung up.
“Steffy,” she said, tilting her head to the side. “Just come.”
“I don’t want to. I want to stay. And . . . and you can’t leave on Christmas.”
“Stef,” she said, “you have your chance to come and have a really nice dinner.”
“I’m making a really nice dinner,” I said. “You helped.”
She sighed. “I know,” she said. She glanced at all the gnocchi on the counter, waiting to be boiled up. “We’ll bring the gnocchi.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t just bring gnocchi somewhere. You have to cook it. We have to cook it. Here. In our house.”
“Stef,” said Nina. “Turn off the sauce. Go pack a sleepover bag. And come with me. Come on.”
While she headed upstairs, I just stood there. The sauce simmered on the stove. There was a loaf of Italian bread waiting to be smeared with butter and chopped garlic. I thought we could play cards or something, or watch a movie and eat caramel corn after dinner. It was the first time that we had made a whole pasta meal without Auntie Gina. And we had really done it.
Nina came back down carrying her backpack and went straight to the front door.
“You coming?” she asked. I shook my head. Her eyes were watery, and she was wiping her nose with a tissue. She had put on lots of eyeliner.
She looked up at the star on the tree and said, “I’m sorry, Steffy.” Her bottom lip was shaking. “This is the meanest thing I’ve ever done, and I know it. And I don’t know why I have to go so much. Except I just can’t be here, in our house, without Auntie Gina. Sorry.”
She was out the door. I heard her bike being wheeled from the garage out to the street. Her bike? We weren’t even supposed to go to Mom’s on our bikes. And where did Denise live? I sat down and held my stomach. Well, fine. She could go to dumb Denise’s for some dumb dinner. Probably it would be bad. It’d be me and Dad, just as soon as he got home.
Later, after the gnocchi were boiled, the garlic bread warmed, and the salad tossed, I sat. And sat. I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, which is a very, very, very long movie. The sun had disappeared. The news came on.
“Dad,” I said.
The word just sat there in the air.
“Dad?”
I yelled for him. I was on the couch, holding a pillow on my stomach, squeezing it, calling for Dad. Where could he have gone on Christmas? And why did Nina leave? Why did Harry have to ask Auntie Gina to marry him?
The dinner had been waiting on the table for hours and I just left it there. I didn’t feel like gnocchi. I felt like an artichoke, is what I felt like. I felt like an artichoke that all the leaves had been pulled off of, and I was just a heart. Whenever we’d made artichokes together, Auntie Gina would say she liked the heart best.
I walked to the front door holding the pillow tight and locked the dead bolt. I wondered what New York was like at Christmastime and what Auntie Gina was doing right then, if she was having dinner at a big table with all of Harry’s relatives.
I called Nina’s cell and could barely leave a message, my voice was all quivery. “Dad’s still not home,” I just said. “Everything got cold.”
For the rest of Christmas, I hid in Nina’s bed with Wiley, half awake, my stomach growling. Every light in the house on. TV downstairs full blast.
Coffee and Sauce
I heard snoring when I woke up. I had left Nina’s door open, but I didn’t hear him come in. The TV was off, and the sun was just starting to peek through Nina’s blinds. I squeezed Wiley to me and closed my eyes again. I didn’t want to think about anything.
Then I woke up to both the smells of coffee and sauce. Light was flooding into Nina’s room. I pulled myself out of her bed and headed downstairs with Wiley. On the table were Dad’s mug with steam rising from it and a bowl of warmed gnocchi.
He looked at his hands when he said, “Hey.”
I said, “Hey.”
I was by myself on Christmas, I missed you, I made dinner, where were you?
He picked a scab on his knuckle and said, “Where’s Nina?”
And I said, “Denise’s.” The knuckle bled. There was a bloody tissue wrapped around his other knuckles. And on the side of his face was a long cut, like someone took a slice out of his skin. There was also his eye. It had a black-and-blue ring underneath it.
The Greensboro that I lived in was a different place from the world of Dad. And I didn’t know if it’d ever feel like he was going to be able to be in my Greensboro. There was this feeling like a door closing inside of me, this tightening up, and I realized how hard I was squeezing Wiley. I kind of felt, right then—more than I had even felt when Dad first came back—that I knew Mr. Richmond, my math teacher, better than I would ever know him.
/> We sat across from each other, him slurping his coffee, me staring at the big bowl of gnocchi in front of him. Two flavors that should never be served together in the same meal.
More Ginger Ale, Anyone?
All during the rest of break, it kind of felt like they wanted to say sorry, but they just didn’t. For Christmas, Nina did give me a cookbook and these orange spatula earrings. And Dad was up early, every day of the week after Christmas, getting ready for work.
Even though I missed the mornings when he’d read the paper and I’d make eggs, I stayed in bed. I didn’t want to sit and try and think of something to say. I didn’t want to see the scabs on his knuckles or the way that his black eye bruise was turning yellow. Plus there were the leftover gnocchi to face.
On the night before we went back to school, I made macaroni and cheese and soup. Dinner went like this:
“So,” said Nina, “I’m sleeping over at Denise’s after dance tomorrow and Tuesday, and then I’ll just go to school with her in the mornings.”
“I can pick you up from the studio,” said Dad.
“You don’t have a car.”
“We can take the bus,” he said.
“No. I’m doing it this way,” said Nina.
“I’m having more ginger ale,” I said.
“Nina, I can pick you up. It’s too many nights out. School nights.”
“No, it’s not,” said Nina.
“More ginger ale?”
“Nina, no,” said Dad.
“You wanna talk about too many nights out, James? You can’t tell me what to do.” Nina was grasping her fork, tight.
“I’m in charge here,” said Dad.
“Not of me.” She said this with a too-sweet voice, and got up and put her dish in the sink. Then she went to her room. Dad stood up and threw down his napkin.
“Nina,” he called as he headed upstairs. I heard him knock on her bedroom door. And wait. And knock. And knock again. And wait. Then the hallway floor creaked as Dad went to his room. His door clicked shut.
As the warm water ran over the pots, I went through all the things I should say and ask. For some reason, I could yell and yell for Dad when I knew he wasn’t here, but I couldn’t say anything to either of them for real. Nobody around here was saying anything that they should. It was just this feeling of everyone being kind of mad, but instead of blowing up, they were just letting it simmer.
After I washed the pots and put everything else in the dishwasher, I knew I should go and do homework that I put off all break—there were these math worksheets and the autobiography outline—but instead I went online and read about rotini pasta in ricotta and mozzarella cheeses. It was the only thing I wanted to do.
While I was clicking around, this thing popped up that said: “Chefs of Tomorrow, Greensboro, NC.” I clicked on the cartoon of a kid wearing big, green oven mitts. It was a cooking contest for kids, right here in Greensboro. I sort of read the information but then the trumpet started. That same song from before that Nina had danced to. Then there was this pounding that made me jump. Nina yelled something from her room about homework. It got quiet again. Too bad. I would’ve liked to hear that song again.
The autobiography outline was nagging at me, so I left the Chefs of Tomorrow website, and I opened my notebook. Still, all my notes were just ingredients and recipes. It sort of hit me that your life was basically a giant recipe—that you decided all the ingredients that you wanted to put into it, like for me cooking and riding my bike and hanging out with Lisa and my family, and for Nina dance and Denise, and for Dad playing the trumpet and I guessed painting houses. And maybe us. Kind of.
It made me wonder what Mom’s ingredients had been. It made me wonder if she ever felt sad that she never got to make a real meal out of her life. And I closed my notebook and went to bed. I hoped Mrs. Ashton would accept a list of ingredients instead of an outline for now, because that was all I had.
Farm-to-Table
The first day at school after New Year’s, it felt like some of me was still at home, fighting coming back. Some of me was back in my room, wondering about my mom and her life, worrying about Dad and Nina and everything that was festering between them. But the other part of me was there at school, trying to pretend everything was normal, that we’d had a good break.
Right before community meeting, Lisa handed me a little square of newspaper that her mom had cut out. It said “Chefs of Tomorrow,” with the cartoon of the oven mitt kid.
“My mom made me bring it,” she said. “It’s your destiny.” I couldn’t help laughing at that. “Look,” she said, pointing to the cutout, “you have to make a main course and a dessert using a common ingredient.”
I read out loud: “‘A parent or guardian must sign off in good faith that the child was the true chef.’” Right then I was back in my room hugging Wiley, wishing Auntie Gina, my guardian for eight official years, had never left. I didn’t know if Lisa could read my mind or something, because right away she said: “Oh, don’t worry about that. Your dad’ll do it. Or your aunt. And look here,” she said, running her finger under a few lines. “If you get picked for the finals, you have to go back and make your thing again on TV!”
“What?” I said, reading on. “Oh my gosh. And the winner gets their meal put on the menu at Lucky Thirty-Two?” I read on. “‘Greensboro’s finest farm-to-table dining establishment’?”
“And three thousand dollars,” said Lisa. My jaw dropped.
All that money? And Lucky 32? I’d never been there, but “farm-to-table” reminded me of the rich flavor of the eggs from Grandpa Falcon’s chickens compared to the kind of flat taste of Harris Teeter eggs. Farm-to-table was straight cooking from actual things you grew in your very own yard, and that was Grandpa Falcon all the way. The memory of making mud pies in Grandpa’s backyard while he pulled up potatoes made this whole contest seem like it was something I had to do no matter what.
After community meeting, Principal Schmitz-Brady came and pulled me aside. I got all jittery when her hand went on my shoulder.
“Ms. Sandolini,” she said. “Chefs of Tomorrow. Look it up.”
I showed her the clipping from Lisa’s mom.
“Are you interested?” she asked. I nodded.
“That’s a girl,” she said, heading off toward the gym’s exit. Lisa convinced me to go with her to the library at lunch, and we pulled up the contest’s website.
“Here,” she said, clicking on age group nine to twelve. I filled everything out. When I got to the bottom of the screen, it said I had to have a grown-up present to sign up.
“I can’t do this now, I guess,” I said.
“Oh yeah, you can. You just say you’re your parent or guardian.” It was true. Basically you just had to click Yes—that you were the parent or guardian and that you gave permission—and then you got taken to the next screen.
Lisa grabbed my hand and made my finger click Submit.
“Oh my gosh,” I said.“I can’t believe I just did that.”
“Believe it,” said Lisa.
I printed out a copy of the application receipt and got an idea. Since I’d planned on showing Mrs. Ashton my ingredients list instead of an official outline, I thought I could also show her my Chefs of Tomorrow application.
In English class, after we’d handed in our outlines and during journaling, I went up to her desk.
“Yes, Stef?”
“Um, I turned in something . . . that’s not quite an outline.”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s . . . it’s a thing that is about me but hasn’t happened yet, but I know I’ll write about it. For the autobiography. Is that okay?”
“I’ll look at it tonight, and if it’s a problem, I’ll let you know. Sound good?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” she said.
Okay. At least I had turned in something. Thank goodness for the Chefs of Tomorrow thing. Thank goodness for Lisa and her mom and Principal Schm
itz-Brady.
That night I told Dad and Nina all about what I did and showed them the application. When I was finished, there was quiet for a second, and then Nina was talking and then Dad was talking.
“Oh my God, Steffany, that’s perfect for you,” said Nina.
“You’re kidding me!” said Dad. “That contest was made for you.”
“I’m voting gnocchi,” said Nina.
“If you want to show them something really Southern, you have to do Brussels sprouts and egg whites,” said Dad.
“Eeew,” said Nina. “No, Italian food. It’s more complicated and impressive that she can make that. For eggs, all you do is fry them, right, Steffy?”
“Well, kind of,” I said, “but you have to season them, too.”
I could have talked about recipes with them all night long. Nina didn’t have a mean tone, and Dad was grinning. All my insides felt lighter—maybe I could go to school tomorrow without feeling all weighted down with worry.
I couldn’t sleep because I was imagining all sorts of meals I could try to cook. It dawned on me while looking at my clock (9:57 p.m.) that I needed to go through my mom’s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I mean, really go through it to find her best recipes in there. There was a fat pile of handwritten ones shoved under the front cover. It was the first week of January. The contest was Saturday, March 30. I had three months to figure it out.
I turned my pillow over and got comfortable on my stomach, and my mind wandered over to the little detail that I’d skipped when I was telling Dad and Nina about Chefs of Tomorrow—how I said on the online sign-up that I was my own parent or guardian. How I never wanted that to feel true again.
The Great Cupcake Burst
What was weird about all those tons of handwritten or newspaper-clipping recipes under the front cover of my mom’s cookbook was that there were no pasta recipes written out at all in there. Or sauce. I guess if you were Italian you just had to watch your aunt a million times and then get your hands in the dough to learn, like I did.