The Kitchen Daughter Read Online Free PDF

me how alone I am now. No one left here but me.
    I remember Great-aunt Connie’s question at the funeral about whether I miss my parents, and of course the answer is yes. Yes, I miss them. Yes, I desperately want them here, to talk with, to trust, tolean my head against. This is the way I’ve always been. I think of the answer long after the person asking the question has lost interest and walked away.
    So this is what distraught feels like. It feels like a stomachache. It feels like a firm hand wringing out the paltry juice from a Key lime, or a French press squeezing the flavor from coffee grounds. It feels like the air bladder that winemakers use to press the juice from the grapes, which they say is gentle but still presses, presses, presses until all the liquid has leaked out and pooled. I’ve read about that. It’s easy to imagine.
    I try to shake the feeling with action. I haul the bag of groceries upstairs and slide it into my closet, pushing it back as far as I can against some old cardboard boxes. But as soon as I’m still, the memory returns.
    Nonna said, You bring me with the smell of ribollita, and I bring the message.
    I go to the kitchen.
    On the stove, cleaned and almost as good as new, is the empty pot I used to make the ribollita. It smelled wonderful. It would have been delicious. I lean down and put the pot back in the cabinet. I put the step stool back in its corner, but it is just a step stool right now.
    She looked so real. One hundred percent. It doesn’t make sense that I hallucinated her. I didn’t even remember that sweater until I saw it. I only remember one sweater of hers, and it wasn’t yellow. But I thought about her, made her food, and there she was.
    Nonna believed in ghosts. Is that what she was? Not a hallucination, but a ghost?
    I miss my parents, and I wish they were here. Dad especially. Can I bring him, by trying? Can I do something that reminds me of him and see his shape on that step stool, looking back at me? Could I say, Dad, I miss you , and hear him say, I know ?
    I look up at the elegant skylight and try to think of my dad. First,his voice, sharp and round at the same time like tomato juice. How he lifted his chin up every time he looked at himself in the mirror in scrubs, and how he jerked his chin down whenever he looked at himself in the mirror in a suit. I picture his cropped white hair, his small ears, his energetic walk. Nothing happens.
    When I was eight I read a book about ESP. I decided to practice bending spoons with my mind every night. No one could know whether practicing would make it possible, if nobody had ever stuck with it long enough. I practiced every night for a couple of months, and then one night, I just didn’t think of it. It was the most important thing and then it wasn’t. Before ESP it was round things, and afterward it was Turkish rug patterns, then letters written by nuns. But along with those, and every day since, it’s been food.
    When I think of Dad, nothing happens. Maybe I need something beyond the memory, something physical, something his.
    Ma kept the alcohol for company in the dining room china cabinet. All the sweet after-dinner liqueurs nestle there together. But there is one bottle she never knew about right here in the kitchen. I reach deep into the cabinets and remove Dad’s hidden bottle of Lagavulin. I set a tumbler on the counter and pour him two fingers of scotch. This is a tumbler, watch it tumble , he said. The golden brown liquid, more gold than brown, somewhere between weak tea and apple juice. I stare at it. Nothing.
    Out loud I say, “This is a tumbler, watch it tumble,” an incantation or a toast or both, and drink it down.
    It’s like drinking a handful of matches. It burns and then smokes. I fight back a cough. There’s a note of something deep and earthy, like beets or truffles, which then vanishes, leaving only a palate seared clean. Nothing lingers. I hope they didn’t suffer. I don’t think they did.
    Yes,