Kitchen Triptych
I.
To mourn my uncle I make gumbo. This is the only recipe I can still intuit. I won’t attend the funeral; among the cousins I have long reigned as the strange one who shirked home for a salary. That was 3,000 days ago, my leaving—the guilt has fermented into something stickier since. Really I won’t go because I worry, listening to eulogies trickle from the pulpit, I’ll fail to summon the tears required of me. Better to stay here and atone at Mawmaw’s stovetop. The repast, she says, will be crowded. Only last week my uncle sodded the yard, encircled the mailbox with mulch and poppies. Now his friends will dent the new earth with their boots.
The other side of my family, the one that speaks even less, sweats onions in butter before adding flour, but my uncle hated onions and peppers and cucumbers and lemons and all produce which bear translucent echoes of germination. Once he split open a finger of fried okra, the pearly seeds tinted pink from oil. This is what the inside of you looks like, he told me, then laughed when I refused my plate, my ill manners later rewarded with a belt. Alone with the pot, the butter spits gold onto my wrist. I stir in flour, make it the roux it begs to be.
My uncle loved home, not like me, his short life fueled by cheap food and shit luck. He plugged the fissures in his mouth with silver caps; his badge shone the same way. Crested pelican, wide gullet. He joked he became a cop for the joy rides. Not to shoot people? He grinned like he hadn’t heard me. It was the last time I’d seen him smile. Stuck between two silver teeth was a fat black seed.
II.
To appease my mother I make chicken and dumplings. Ever since the hurricane cast us to this different coast she says the broth won’t thicken right. She blames the altitude and the hard water. I decipher Mawmaw’s scrawl on a yellowed index card, the cookie tin where it hibernates shining beside a low flame.
The issue was a shortcut: my mother substituted breasts for the whole bird. I explain how boiling water siphons collagen from bone, the watery result a consequence of her cutting corners. As I’m speaking I realize how much I sound like her when she was my age. Now, she rolls her eyes and calls me a know-it-all. Still, when it’s time, she helps me slip bone from flesh, deposit steaming meat into a metal bowl. I say nothing when she forgoes the city flour I brought for Bisquik.
Over dinner we talk politics, platitudes. Yes, I will call more. No, I hadn’t known Mawmaw was coming up for a visit, all this way. Yes, I will come stay. In my mouth white gravy acts as the great homogenizer; beneath its blanket I taste nothing, everything, all of it at once.
III.
To soothe Mawmaw I make sausage and cheese balls. In her old age she won’t wear her dentures or stop sending me death jokes. A couple months after the funeral she gifted me a laminated book of recipes so I could stop lugging the cookie tin between moves. On the first page there is an epigraph, “Something for my family to remember me by,” before a tutorial for Poor Man’s Spaghetti. We thought my uncle’s sudden death might mollify her, but on my phone a new text blinks: Not dead yet but getting there, when I ask for her ETA.
My mother tells me if she is this morose by 65 I must find a way to euthanize her. I focus on the crinkle of pork on my latex palms. As a child, I hated the film the balls left in my mouth, the proof of grease. I imagined my tongue resembled the leftover foil cooling on the sheet pan, made useless, dotted with crop circles of old worth.
The recipe says to use cheddar or whatever else is on hand, but I never have the right things. In the pantry, items I brought along are deemed REDUCED or LESSER by sans serif bolds. I substitute Philadelphia for Neufchâtel, Panko for cornmeal. In the oven the balls yellow more than they brown. They inflate but do not crisp, feeble without their lace butter skirts. I chew them how babies chew, all jaw, dissatisfied.
The balls are still warm when Mawmaw arrives. Her own chew is discerning. I take her bags and explain the shortcomings of the pantry, how I was forced to get creative. She shakes her head. Your problem, she says, is you think everything can be improved.