“Better than the alternative.”
Dad is a family lawyer, has been his whole life.
“I would agree.”
He takes another sip, considers it. “Should we go to Urth and get oatmeal?”
Urth Caffé on Melrose Avenue is my dad’s favorite haunt. It’s a California café within walking distance with a big menu and decent food.
“It’s not my favorite,” I always tell him.
“It doesn’t have to be, but it does the trick.”
I look at the clock on the stove. “They don’t open for another two hours.”
“I’m starving. It’s been three hours since I ate.” He winks at me.
I start to move off the couch. “I’ll make you some oatmeal.”
My dad sets his mug down on the coffee table. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he says, but he’s already taking off his shoes.
CHAPTER FOUR
I started cooking sometime in the pandemic, when my main source of nutrients was frozen-food packages and then produce boxes from Jon & Vinny’s, an Italian restaurant on Fairfax that became a grocer during those early months. Every week a woman named Miranda in purple plastic gloves and a paisley-print face mask would load into my back seat a box filled with beet greens, radishes, once a yellow cucumber—whatever the farmers had harvested that week—and I’d google what to do with them.
The kitchen is a stone’s throw from the couch, but Dad still comes over to the counter to sit closer to me. He peels open the newspaper as I take out a pot, organic rolled oats, cinnamon, and some wild blueberries from the freezer.
Pea cozies up to the doorframe to see who is here and then backs out as quietly as she came in. She doesn’t love visitors.
“I love when you cook for me,” he says. “Yes, Chef!”
“It’s just oatmeal.”
Dad looks up at me. “You’re my daughter,” he says. “Everything you do impresses me.”
Dad has always been effusive with his love. He’ll tell me “I love you” twelve times a day. I both revel in it and at times find itchallenging. Not the love or praise, but the insistence on it. The need to make every moment have some kind of meaning. I don’t get these kind of displays from my mom. She’s practical and careful but not necessarily warm. All the liquid in our family comes from my father.
I’m also not particularly impressive. Except, I would say, in my ability to take care of him. My mother and I have always looked after dad. Since that car accident we’ve stood around him like security guards—warding off any possible danger.
My mother wishes he would stop surfing—it’s dangerous and physical, that’s for certain. I worry about it less than she does, though. Maybe because for so many years I was out there with him.
“You need to relax a little about your dad,” Leo will tell me. “He’s good! Let the man live.” But Leo also doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about the accident, or the remaining silver ticket that sits locked away in Malibu. It is not his secret, it’s ours.
The water boils, and I drop the oats in, turning the temperature down to a simmer. Dad likes thick oatmeal, so do I, and I wait until it starts to pop and bubble before adding in raisins and blueberries and giving it a good stir.
I load the contents into bowls, heap cinnamon and maple syrup on top—plus a little Trader Joe’s granola for crunch—and pass one to him. Steam rises off the top in aromatic waves. Dad takes his glasses off to eat.
“Oh, wow,” he says. “This is delicious. You do it better than Urth, that’s for sure.”
I join him at the counter as the sun creeps farther across the floor, like a teenager trying to sneak in unnoticed.
We eat in silence for a few moments.
“So what’s on the docket for today?” he asks.
“A few meetings,” I say. I take a lot of them virtually from home these days. “Probably leftovers for lunch. And then I thought I’d spend the night at the beach.”
Dad’s eyes twinkle. “We’d love that,” he says. “Shabbat pasta.”
