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“It’s an O,” he explains, in case the O is unclear. “For Olivia. So you always have a piece of me in your pocket.”
I don’t know where he got that line. I’ve never said it in my life. He just made it up. And she holds that rock like it’s the Hope Diamond, and puts it in her pocket.
Then she hands me mine. A book. A history of Dallas Fire Rescue, out of print, that she found somewhere and had shipped, and inside the cover, in her small even hand:
For the ones you couldn’t save, and the hundreds you did.
I don’t trust my voice, so I pull her in and kiss the top of her head and hold on a second too long, and she lets me.
Then it’s my turn to give her mine, and I’m more nervous about it than I’ve been about anything in a while, which is stupid, because it’s a box.
I made it myself. That’s the part I can’t decide if she’ll clock. Sanded and joined it in the garage over three weeks of evenings after Bo went down, a little wooden recipe box, walnut, hinged lid, my initials burned into the bottom where nobody would look. It’s not perfect. There’s a seam on the back that didn’t close as clean as I wanted and I ran out of time to redo it. But I built it, with my hands, which is the only language I’ve ever been any good at.
She lifts the lid.
Inside it’s full of cards. Dozens of them, some new, most old and soft at the corners, and she picks up the first one and goes still, because she knows that handwriting. She’s spent enough nights helping Dottie in the kitchen to know that careful, looping cursive anywhere.
“These are Dottie’s,” she says.
“They are.”
I clear my throat, because I’ve got a whole thing I want to say.
“Those recipes don’t leave the family. That’s not me being dramatic, it’s a rule older than me. Dottie’s kept them in a tin in her cabinet my whole life, and when I asked her to write them out fresh so I could give them to you, she didn’t even ask why. She just started writing. Took her a week.” I shrug, because if I don’t shrug I’ll say too much. “She did the mashed potatoes you watched her make at Thanksgiving. The meatloaf. Her mother’s dumplings, which nobody’s managed to make right in two generations, if you want to be the one who breaks the streak.”
Olivia’s turning the cards over one at a time, slow, the way she does everything, reading Dottie’s hand, and she isn’t saying anything, which from Olivia is not a bad sign. It’s the opposite.
“I can’t cook. You know this. Bo knows this. The station knows this. But this family eats good, always has, because Dottie made sure of it. And now there’s you, and you cook like it’s a way of loving people.” I have to look at the box instead of her. “I wanted you to have a piece of where we come from.”
That’s as close as I get, out loud, to the real thing I want to say. I don’t hand this out. Dottie guarded these her whole life. Handing them to you is the same as handing you the last name, just a few months early.
She keeps going, and she finds the newer cards mixed in. Bo’s, crooked and huge, for his favorite no bake cookies. A couple in a hand she doesn’t know, from an aunt back in the day.
And then she gets to mine.
I watch her find it. Watch her eyebrows go up. Watch her press her lips together to keep something in and lose.
“Luke.”
“Yeah?”
“This one’s yours.”
“Could be.”
She reads it out loud, because it’s the only decent thing to do with it. “’Macaroni and Cheese. By Luke Baker.’” Her voice is already going. “’Step one. Fill a pot with water. Do not walk away.’”
“That’s just good safety advice.”
“’Step two. When it boils, add the noodles. Set a timer.” She’s laughing now, fully. “’Step three. Drain the noodles.”
“It’s a classic recipe.”
“’Step four. Cheese packet, butter, milk. Stir. Step five. Serve to one tired dad and one kid who will not eat anything else on God’s green earth.’” She wipes her eye with the back of her wrist. “You wrote a recipe for boxed macaroni?”
“Dottie said everybody had to have at least one card. That’s the only thing I know how to make that comes out the same twice.”
She’s laughing as she skims through the rest.
