Page 78

“Flour. Potatoes. Sour cream. Onions. Butter.”

Iris considered the list. “That’s not food.”

“That’s the start of food.”

“What food?”

“Perogies.”

She had never heard the word in her life and her face said so, and she looked at Gerald to see if he’d heard it either.

“My mother used to make them,” I said. “Her mother taught her. It takes about four hours and everybody gets flour on them and at the end there are more than any reasonable person can eat.”

“Four hours.” Iris was appalled and delighted. “For dinner?”

“For dinner.”

“D is going to lose her mind.”

I didn’t answer that. I put more onions in the cart than the recipe needed, because I’d been up since four thinking about Delaney and my hands needed a job.

My mother had always made perogies look easy.

Not one step of it was hard. The dough was flour and hot water and a little sour cream, and it pulled together under my hands in about ten minutes. The filling was potatoes and cheese and onion, the onion cooked down slow in butter until it turned brown and sweet and the kitchen smelled the way hers used to. The rolling and the cutting and the filling and the crimping were where the four hours went.

My mother was in Transcona and had never once made it to Phoenix in November, and the card propped against my toaster was the only piece of her handwriting in the house. Flour til it stops sticking. There wasn’t an amount anywhere on it. She wrote it out the week I signed, when I was nineteen and sitting across from her sure I’d never need it, and she knew better and wrote it anyway. Iris couldn’t read. She’d worked out what the card was soon after it turned up on the counter, and now she said good morning to it every day on her way to the cereal.

Iris was assigned the cutter, which was a drinking glass, and her job was to press circles out of the rolled dough. She accepted the assignment with tremendous gravity, tongue out, both hands on the glass, and did most of a row before she began to freelance. The glass came up with a rim of dough on its lip, and she cleaned it off on her palm and wiped the hand down the front of her shirt.

“Can I make one that’s a square?”

“They have to be circles.”

“Why?”

“Because they have to close.”

She thought about it. Then she cut a square anyway with the edge of the glass, four careful sides, and slid her eyes sideways at me to see what the penalty would be. I filled it and crimped it and it finished as a small lopsided pillow, and I set it apart from the others on the tray.

“That one’s yours.”

“That’s mine,” Iris told Gerald, who was on the counter with flour on his snout.

She cut nine more squares. She didn’t ask again. She cut them and slid each one down the counter toward me with two fingers, fast, her eyes down on the dough, and I filled every one and crimped every one. None of them would hold together in a pot of boiling water.

The flour got away from us in the second hour. Iris had it to both elbows and a white handprint across one cheek from pushing her hair back. My mother’s kitchen used to end up the same wreck. I stood on a chair in hers year after year and asked for a job, and I never got one. My daughter had a job before she’d finished climbing onto her chair.

I stopped rolling. It was the middle of a Sunday morning, I had flour to both wrists, and my chest had closed up tight.

“Daddy.”

“Mm.”

“You stopped.”

“I know,” I said, and started again.

Delaney opened the casita door on the worst of it and stopped dead half in and half out. Her hair was up in a knot that was sliding loose, and her feet were bare, one of them resting on top of the other. Her eyes traveled over the four trays and the counter and the floor and my daughter up on a chair with white to both elbows. They got to me last, tracked from the flour down my shirt to the flour in my beard to the dog-eared card against the toaster, and stopped there and stayed.