Page 7 of First Moon

He reached into his pocket and handed his phone to me. “You’ll need my password to open it.”

“You’re giving me your password?”

“That way you’ll know you can always check my phone because I’ve got nothing to hide.”

I smiled. “Good to know. Okay, then. Shoot.”

“It’s my sister Luci’s birthday. LW052394, followed by an exclamation point. I’ve had the same password since 2012.”

“No way that’s possible.”

“I never lie,” he said.

“I change mine all the time, mostly ‘cause I can’t remember what they are. It’s an unending circle of resetting.”

“You could write it down.”

“But then someone might see it,” I said. “And then they’d know all my secrets.”

“You have secrets?”

“One or two,” I said. “How about you?”

“One or two.”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” I said.

“Deal.”

I headed toward the door, knowing he was watching my hind-end as I walked. I wished it was a little rounder and plumper. However, my whole family was cursed with bottoms as flat as a hotcake off the griddle. Maybe Jack Wilder liked his girls flat in all the places they weren’t supposed to be. I guess I’d find out when I put on my swimsuit and dove into his pool.

3

JACK

Chicken and dumplings. My new nemesis.

Flat, not fluffy. The way they’re supposed to be made. The way Ivy’s mama made them. How was I to know what recipe she used? Or if she used any at all. Maybe women born and raised in Tennessee came out of the womb knowing how to make the perfect broth and flat biscuits. In Washington state, where I’d been raised, I couldn’t remember anyone making this dish. But this woman who had stolen my heart this morning wanted chicken and dumplings and, God help me, I was going to make them for her.

I stood in my kitchen, sleeves rolled up, trying to make a dish worthy of Ivy James and not feeling entirely up to the task. Flour coated the counter. Some had spilled on the floor, and my cat, Oscar, had come over to supervise and gotten his paws in it, so now there were kitty tracks all over my hardwood floors. So far, I had a whole chicken cooling in a bowl. Carrots, celery, and onion chopped fine, as instructed by the recipe. My phone sat beside the stove, screen bright with three different recipes, none of which agreed with each other, except that the vegetables should be finely cut for the best texture.

One recipe had called for canned biscuits. I’d closed that tab immediately. There was no way Ivy’s mama made them with biscuits from a can. And, anyway, I knew how to make biscuits. Only mine were fluffy, not flat. Flat dumplings were rolled thin, cut into strips, and dropped right into the broth. Simple, supposedly. I put on plastic gloves to pull the chicken from the bone, dropping the meat back into the broth.

I’d been cooking since I was eight years old. The last time my father left us had been in the evening while Mama was still at work, doing a double shift. Luci was four and hungry for dinner. Mama wouldn’t be home for hours. Even that young, I knew our daddy was not coming back this time. Maybe it was the way he’d hopped on his motorcycle with the girl two trailers over from ours wrapped around his waist. I’d watched it all from the small porch of our trailer, holding onto the railing for dear life, rain falling steadily like it did in Stonehaven, Washington, during the month of March. And I’d known. He wasn’t coming back this time. I was the man of the house now.

Luci, clutching her yellow blanket to her chest, had tugged at my sleeve and said her tummy was rumbly. So I pulled out my mother’s old Betty Crocker cookbook and asked Luci to tell me what was in the refrigerator. “We’ll find something to make.”

She’d padded obediently over to the refrigerator, yellow blanket dragging behind her, and told me what she saw. “Bologna. Tortillas. Cheese. But it has spots on it.”

“That’s just a little mold. We can work with it. I’ll just cut the bad parts off.”

Like I would later come to think about my father’s departure.

I hadn’t found any recipes that called for the ingredients we had in the trailer, so I improvised. The bologna quesadilla was born that evening. To this day, Luci and I always make a batch the first night we’re together. We tried elevating the meat portion to prosciutto when I started making money, but it wasn’t the same. We went right back to a good old-fashioned, wholly processed American bologna. Luci told me it got her through medical school when she was broke. “Ironic,” she’d said one time after she’d become a certified pediatrician, “since I tell my patients’ mothers to stay away from processed food. If they only knew about eighty percent of me is bologna.”

Now, I made a well in the flour, added salt, a little fat, and enough cold broth to bring the dough together. At first it clung to my fingers, but I added more flour and worked it gently. That was the trick, apparently. Handle it, but don’t over-handle it. Like a woman.

While I worked, I thought about my house and what Ivy would think when she saw it. Would she notice the details the designer and I had chosen so carefully? The white clapboard exterior with black-trimmed windows or the brick walkway lined with boxwoods and flowers I couldn’t name without checking the notes the landscaper had given me. Would she take note of the wide front porch with rocking chairs set close enough for a conversation while a couple’s growing old together?