www.DinnerByDad.com
Did I ever tell you about the first meal I made for Jacqui? We’d been dating for three weeks and four days. She was in law school, stressed and exhausted and beautiful. I invited her to my apartment. I sent my roommates out for the night. That part was easy. I cleaned the bathroom! That part was hard. But I was halfway in love with Jacqui already, so I took my toothbrush and I went at the sink with it until the residue of four post-college young men was eradicated.
I went to the store. I bought spaghetti, cheese. I bought a new toothbrush, because the one I’d used to clean was my only one. Lettuce for a salad. It was iceberg! That’s how little I knew, back then. I had sauce in my fridge. When I got home and opened the jar I saw a bit of mold furred on the inside of the lid. I went back to the store. I got a new jar of sauce. This was before it was easy to find good sauce in a jar. I’m sure there were some, but I didn’t know enough to look for them. I think I bought Prego.
I started cooking. My mom called. I told her what I was doing. She said, “Whatever you do, do not serve that woman powdered cheese. I raised you better than that. Grate it fresh.”
I said nothing.
She said, “Leo? Do you hear me? Buy a good block of Parmesan.”
I went back to the store. I bought a good block of Parmesan. I bought a grater. At this point my grocery budget for the week was gone, maybe even for the month. The cheese was really expensive. I started grating. I grated the first layer of my third finger along with the cheese. I threw out the cheese, all of it, because I couldn’t tell where the cheese ended and my finger skin began. I went back to the powdered cheese. I poured it into a little bowl I found in the back of the cupboard, hoping it looked classier that way. It didn’t.
My finger kept bleeding. Did we have Band-Aids in that apartment? I’ll let you guess.
I served the woman who became the love of my life the most boring, most predictable, least homemade meal there is with a hunk of toilet paper wrapped around my finger and held there with a piece of duct tape. When Jacqui ate every bit of that meal and asked for seconds, I knew I loved her. When she heaped the powdered cheese on and gamely used the back of her fork to flatten a cheese ball, I knew I loved her more.
Flash forward. Tonight I am serving my taco salad with vegetables I grew myself in my backyard garden. I might make a summer cocktail to go with it: something with tequila and jalapeño. (Recipes to follow.)
I learned to cook as my gift to Jacqui and our family. This is what I could do for them to make all of us happier and healthier and give us all a reason to come together. You can do it too, readers. It doesn’t have to be hard. But it does have to be better.
When Maggie was finished at Joy Bombs and ready to help Lu, she toted the boys off to the beach, taking extra care with their sunscreen. Due to Sebastian’s near miss earlier in the summer, they were under a strict no-swimming order when Lu wasn’t there. But they could build sandcastles, run footraces, play tic-tac-toe in the sand.
Lu was trying to figure out how best to photograph the tequila cocktail when the doorbell rang. She started, then took cover behind the living room curtain so she could peer out at the driveway without being seen. Shit: it was Nancy.
“Lu! Yoo-hoo! Lu!” Nancy rang the doorbell and knocked at the same time. Nancy was the only person Lu knew who actually said, “Yoo-hoo!” with a straight face.
Lu watched the doorknob turn slowly; she was cursing herself for not locking it, but Lu had confirmed that Nancy had an extra key, and she definitely had enough gall to use it, so it was hopeless either way. She took a sharp left turn and tiptoed quickly up the stairs, bringing her laptop with her. She needed to save everything she’d been working on and keep it out of Nancy’s sight.
Nancy pushed open the door.
“Just a sec!” called Lu. “Just coming down!” She ran down the stairs and threw herself in front of the door, blocking Nancy from entering. She’d left some of the cocktail fixings out on the counter; she didn’t think Nancy was going to be on board with the idea of day drinking, especially if Jeremy had told Nancy about their fight.
Nancy peered around her, trying to see what Lu was keeping her from. “Jeremy said you might need some extra help, so I thought I’d stop by. I would have come yesterday but I had an engagement.”
“Extra help?” Lu wondered if Nancy came in, Lu could shuttle the cocktail glasses into the sink before Nancy had a chance to see them.
“He said you’ve been worn out lately.” So he’d told her something. Nancy smiled conspiratorially. “Ooooh, maybe you’re pregnant!”
“Definitely not,” said Lu. Definitely not.
“Soon, I’m sure.”
“Here’s hoping.” Lu manufactured her own smile and plastered it to her face. “Chase has been having nightmares, that’s all. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
Nancy’s face fell. “Oh. Well, soon enough, I’m sure.” Lu wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten caught up in this third-child conspiracy. Two children had always seemed exactly right to Lu: one for each hand. Maybe that was because she had grown up in a small family, while Jeremy had two brothers. Whatever the reason, he was gung-ho to go for the bigger family. He always said “go for,” like a new baby was a tricky soccer shot. It was easier for Jeremy to talk like that because if a new baby came along he’d be mainly watching from the sidelines while Lu ran up and down the field.
“Where are the boys?” Nancy bobbed and weaved; there was a second when Lu thought she was going to duck right under her arms to get past her.
“They’re upstairs.”
“Maybe I’ll just come in and say hi.”
“Oh, gosh, I wish you could, but they’re napping!”
Nancy looked at her shrewdly and said, “Chase doesn’t nap.”
“Not at home, he doesn’t,” said Lu. “But something about the salt air here, all the sun—he gets really wiped out. I was just checking on them, they’re out like a couple of lights.”
“Call me when they wake up,” said Nancy. “Maybe I’ll come back.”
“That would be so great,” said Lu. “They’d love it.”
She hustled Nancy out the front door and made her way back to the kitchen. Before returning to the cocktail scene she checked her email. She had seventy-eight new messages, one of which said, Invitation! in the subject heading. Lu got a little fluttery feeling in her stomach just as she used to as a girl when she got asked to a birthday party.
She read the email, then reread it. She was invited to Sapor!, one of the biggest food blogging conferences in the country. Sapor! was huge; it was the conference that had launched a thousand bloggers. It would take place over five days. In San Francisco! Not only was Lu invited, she was invited to be a panelist. The topic of her panel: “Infusing Your Blog with Real-Life Stories.”
She would be speaking on the third day, though she was invited and encouraged to attend for all five. How was she going to manufacture a five-day trip? She couldn’t call it a girls’ trip. She didn’t have enough friends to go on girls’ trips, and anyway girls’ trips of more than two nights were frivolous, everybody knew that.
Equally pressing, how was she going to present herself as a stay-at-home dad in front of a live audience? Necessity being the mother of invention, she’d have to figure it out. Later.
I’d love to, she wrote back. Thank you so much for the invitation.
A text came in: Jeremy.
Mom says you were acting funny. Everything OK?
How perfect that Nancy had gone right to Jeremy with news of Lu’s erratic behavior. Nancy probably suspected Lu of something trite, like an affair. Normally this would have bothered Lu, but just now, with the invitation in front of her, she didn’t care.
Everything’s great, she texted back. Couldn’t be better.