“Surprise visit,” I said, letting her pull me into a hug that smelled like lavender and the vanilla candles she kept burning in every room. “Thought I'd stop in.”
She stepped back and looked at me with that particular mom expression that said she could tell I was off but wasn't going to push yet. “Come in, sweetheart. You look exhausted.”
I followed her inside and immediately heard my dad's voice from the kitchen. “Is that my boy? Ro, come look at this.”
“Come look at what?” my mom called back, already suspicious.
“I've been teaching myself to bake.”
My mom stopped walking. “Martin. We talked about this.”
“We talked about the incident with the stand mixer. This is completely different. I'm doing it by hand.”
I walked into the kitchen and found my dad standing at the counter with flour on his forearms, a mixing bowl in front of him, and an expression of extreme concentration that suggested the situation was either under control or about to become catastrophically not. He looked up when I came in and his face split into a grin.
“Rook. Perfect. I need a second opinion.”
“On what?”
“On whether this looks like cookie dough or cement.”
I looked at the bowl. It was a legitimate question. “What were you going for?”
“Chocolate chip. Your grandmother's recipe.” He held up a handwritten index card that had clearly survived decades of kitchen use, the edges soft and the writing faded. “I found it inthe back of the recipe box last week and I thought, how hard can it be?”
“How hard can it be,” my mom repeated, in the tone of a woman who had heard that specific sentence many times and knew exactly where it led.
“It's a cookie, Martha. It's not engineering.”
I looked at the bowl again. “What step are you on?”
“Step four of seven.” My dad held up the card. “It says to cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. I did that. Then add eggs. Did that. Then it says to fold in the flour gradually and I may have done it all at once.”
“That's why it looks like cement,” I said.
“See, but here's the thing.” He held up one finger. “If you add a little more butter, does it not just?—”
“No,” my mom and I said simultaneously.
My dad looked between us with the expression of a man outvoted on something he still believed in. Then he set down the mixing bowl with a kind of dignified resignation. “Fine. We start over.”
“I'll help,” I said, mostly because it gave me something to do with my hands.
My mom put the kettle on and pulled up a stool at the counter and watched the two of us with the particular expression she reserved for situations that were either going to be fine or going to require cleanup. My dad washed the bowl, found the butter in the fridge, and handed me the recipe card with great ceremony.
“You read, I'll do,” he said.
“You'll do what I tell you.”
“That's what I said.”
We started over. I read out each step and my dad followed with the focused attention he usually reserved for things he genuinely cared about, which turned out to include his mother'schocolate chip cookies. He creamed the butter properly, added the eggs one at a time, and stood back with visible satisfaction when the texture came together the way it was supposed to.
“There,” he said. “See? Engineering.”
“You just followed instructions.”
“That's what engineering is.”
