I want to be fifteen again at our old kitchen table with this same card between us.
Except I never sat at the table when Mamma wanted me to. Instead, I went out with friends, or a boy, or anyone. Just as long as I wasn’t there.
I can’t call her and ask what “a pinch” means to her hand. It’s a weight on my heart and a lump in my throat while I’m pushing flour into a volcano on my counter: I will never be able to call and ask again, not about this, not about anything. The grief is so clean and sudden, I have to grip the counter and breathe through it.
“Okay,” I tell nobody. “Okay.”
I can do this.
No, I can’t.
I crack the eggs into the crater of flour on the cutting board. Yolks slide out like coins. My mother always cracked with one hand. I do not have that skill, so I do it like a normal person and fish out a shard of the shell. I sprinkle a little salt over the eggs and take a fork to them, beating until they’re streaky, then pull flour in from the walls. It’s messy. The volcano collapses. Of course it does. The yolks try to slide beneath the cutting board.
I laugh once, a short, angry sound, and herd the yolks back into the flour with the side of my hand. I keep mixing, keep scraping, and when the fork stops being useful, I use my fingers. It’s sticky and then it’s not, dough forming into something that might be a ball if I squint hard enough. I add a whisper of water because the card says “if needed,” and it feels needed.
Then it’s too sticky again.
Kneading is supposed to be meditative. It is, if you know what you’re doing, I guess. I don’t. I press and fold and turn and press again.
The dough fights, then softens, then fights again. After eight minutes, my forearms burn and I am covered in flour like a clumsy child. I keep going because Mamma’s “liscia come il lobo dell’orecchio” has become a challenge, a dare from a woman who isn’t here anymore. I press, fold, turn.
When I think it’s smooth enough—or I give up, which is the same thing right now—I press the dough into a disc and wrap it. It’s definitely not as smooth as an earlobe, but it’ll have to do for now.
The card says to rest it. Fine. I put it under a bowl and set a timer. Ten minutes. Fifteen. I don’t know. I go with twenty because it sounds familiar, like something my mother would do while making me set the table.
While the dough rests, I stare down the other recipe card on the counter. “Cacio e pepe.” Three ingredients. Cheese, pepper, pasta water. I picked it because it looked like the easiest thing in the world. It is not. My first try an hour ago turned into a bowl of peppered scrambled eggs. I watched the cheese seize and break, watched the glossy sauce I remember my mamma making turn into clumps that refused to melt.
Watched my patience separate along with it. I cleaned the pan and pretended I hadn’t nearly thrown it at the wall.
I should make sugo. I know sugo. But I’m stubborn. Also: if I have to eat sugo and boxed pasta a fifth time this week, I might actually cry.
The timer goes off. I uncover the dough, and it feels different—a little more elastic. There are still some lumps in them, but it’s better than my first try. I flour the counter again, because apparently there is no such thing as too much flour when you’re me, and cut the dough into four. One quarter stays; the rest goes back under the bowl so it doesn’t dry out. I press the piece into a small rectangle and feed it into the widest setting of the pasta maker.
It tears. Not catastrophically, but enough to make my shoulders climb toward my ears. I run it through again, folding the ends over, and over again. On the third pass, I get something thatlooks like a sheet. It has frayed edges, a weird, thick spot in the middle, and a rip the size of New Jersey.
I flour it and keep going. Narrower setting. Crank. The hand crank pops out of the side of the machine, skitters across the counter, and I say a word my mother would not approve of. I jam it back in and keep turning.
The sheet comes out thinner. It also comes out like a map of the trenches. Lumps. Bubbles. I realize I didn’t knead long enough, and this is how I learn that the earlobe test is real. I want to throw the dough away and start over, but starting over would mean admitting defeat, and I’ve burned through that quota this week.
Plus, I’m getting really hungry and have no backup plan.
I think about the day we made fresh pasta in Home Ec in middle school. I bragged to Mamma about it afterward, and she smiled and said, “Allora, you can help me next time,” and I said I had plans with Jenna and didn’t.
I think about the afternoon she made cacio e pepe when I was sick and refused the first bowl until she put it in a mug and spooned it into my mouth like when I was a toddler. It tasted like salt and warmth, and the pepper made my nose run. I would give anything for her to tell me what the water should feel like when the cheese goes in, the exact moment to stir.
With tears in my eyes, I fold the dough back into the towel and try the sauce. If I can manage that, I’ll throw some boxed pasta in and just eat it. At least I’ll have something.
I toast pepper in a dry pan, and it smells amazing, like the inside of an old wood drawer and heat. I grind more because it says so on the recipe card. I should just look online. I should just eat cereal again.
I grit my teeth and keep going. No, I’m making Mamma’s recipe, or I’m starving.
The pan warms. I tip the pepper out and wipe the pan with a paper towel.
I look at the next step and realize it says to pour some pasta water in. I don’t have any damn pasta water because I don’t have any damn pasta.
I blow out a breath, turn off the stove, and step back, trying not to sink to the floor in tears.
Come on, Elena. You face down criminals every single day. Are you going to let some pepper and cheese bring you to tears?
