Some time had passed, perhaps more than usual, since we’d last seen my father and one night not long after our driving out to Emerson, Tess and I went to his house for dinner. He was cooking from his favorite cookbook. He loved it because it included photographs of each ingredient the way it should be prepared for a given dish. All of it was laid out for him. He’d opened some good wine from one of those Washington wineries that now sells a single bottle for eighty bucks. Then, those places were practically unknown and he loved showing us what he’d found. Wine, another realm of ritual and order, just like the church, just like carpentry.
They were easy together, Tess and my father, affectionate and playful. That evening I sat in the living room in the corduroy easy chair and watched them in the kitchen. It drove him crazy when anyone tried to help, but Tess wouldn’t leave him alone until he gave her a job. He took his preparation seriously—each ingredient arranged in a neat pile, or in a small ceramic ramekin. He followed recipes as if they were sacred commandments, and he was tortured by vague instructions like “to taste” or “a pinch.” Tess made fun of him relentlessly, and when he asked her to read them aloud, was always hiding things, or editing the recipes to include ridiculous additions and outsized measurements.
I loved to watch them without me, playing in their world together. Tess laughing and my father pretending to be angry and Tess consoling him by jumping on his back and kissing his head, or tickling him when he was chopping carrots with one of his deadly Japanese knives.
“What have you done to those peppers? That’s not a perfect square. It’s ruined, it’s all ruined.”
He’d threaten to cut off her hand.
This night I’m thinking of, Tess had nearly convinced him that the recipe called for some enormous amount of chili flakes. He’d measured them out and was holding the metal scoop above the simmering sauce. I was holding my breath. Tess sitting on the counter, her hands on her knees, watching, bottom lip between her teeth. He turned and narrowed his eyes at her. She broke then into her weird squeaking laugh—half gasping, half giggling. My father chased her into the living room where they squared off in front of me.
Tess liked to box with him and she brought her fists up trying her best to keep a serious face. He took slow openhanded swings at her head and she ducked them the way he’d showed her.
“Drop, don’t bend, drop, don’t bend.”
Before it ended he let her punch him in the stomach.
“Go on little girl, let’s see what you got.”
She hit him with all her strength. Gave everything. Tess so determined.
When she landed it, he laughed and said, “Like marble. Don’t break your hand, little girl.”
They liked each other so much.
Those evenings with my father, the three of us eating dinner in his warm house, the fire going, getting a little drunk, laughing, seeing the two of them together, that kind of affection, I wanted nothing more in my life.
But then my mother was out there locked away in the cold. And no matter what joy we felt, what softness, what comfort, she was always there—a counterweight, a reminder of what existed in the world beyond our fortune.