He dances a little, thrusting his hips as the other guys whoop. But I’m actually glad they razz me. After my dad died, they could barely look at me. The whole kitchen was so quiet.
“Nice moves,” I tell Gabe, who is still doing his stupid-ass dance. “Had plenty of practice humping nothing, huh?”
He flicks me off, grinning while the others start in on him. Even Felix laughs. It’s a big, round laugh like my dad’s. Their friendship spanned so many years that their personalities melded together. Felix uses a lot of the same words and phrases from inside jokes. Sometimes he inflects a word the way my dad would. Or maybe it’s that my dad sounded like Felix sometimes. On the good days, he makes me feel closer to my dad. On the bad days, he makes me miss my dad until it feels like my ribs are splitting apart.
“Get out of here, then, Maní,” Felix says as he heads into the office. The office is really a broom closet with a desk and shelf shoved in. My dad, tall as he was, always looked ridiculous in there. “Go call your girl.”
I return home with two grocery bags of supplies for my usual pizza menu. One pizza will be simple, for Silas, Bekah, and Isaac—the pepperoni purists. And for Vivi, if she’s a meat eater. If not, she can have some of the artichoke, spinach, and feta cheese pizza. My mom loves it, and so does Naomi, because she’s a vegetarian. I hope Vivi wants that one because it’s my most inventive pizza—the impressive one. I’ll also make a small cheese pizza for Leah. She hates any other toppings to even touch her pizza, and she barely likes tomato sauce. Basically, it’s round cheesy bread. I’ll eat whatever is left over because I like them all.
When I turn onto our street, I see Silas on the front lawn. He’s pitching a Wiffle ball to Isaac, who swings and hits nothing but summer air. Bekah laughs from the infield, and Leah doesn’t notice. I think she’s supposed to be playing outfield, but she’s dancing around in the grass instead. By the time I’m near them, Silas’s pitch connects with Isaac’s bat, and Silas misses the catch, pretending like he made an honest effort. Isaac stumbles toward first base, which appears to be a flattened cereal box.
They only ask Silas to play Wiffle ball these days, not me. When I stopped coming home in my uniform last spring, I told them I’d stopped liking baseball. That I hadn’t gone out for the team again because it wasn’t as fun as I thought. The truth was that I had to be home with them. Naomi was at college, my mom wouldn’t get out of bed, and Silas couldn’t do it on his own.
“Hey, guys,” I say. There are several responses at once. Isaac demands to know if I saw his hit, Bekah asks what’s for dinner, and Leah wants to know when Vivi is coming over. “Yes, I saw the hit, and it was awesome. We’re having homemade pizza for dinner, and I told Vivi to come over around six.”
“Who’s Vivi?” Silas asks, recovering the Wiffle ball that Isaac hit.
“My friend!” Leah says.
I make eye contact with Silas. “I’ll tell you later.”
That’s all it takes for me to become old news. Isaac begs Silas to pitch again, and Bekah argues that it’s her turn. I’m not dealing with this noise. No way. I’ve paid my dues for the day.
Inside, I assemble the ingredients from the store with the ones I already had at home. I use my dad’s pizza sauce recipe, which he altered from my grandmother’s recipe. She was born in Sicily, so that piece of paper is Italian gold. Not that I need the recipe card anymore. The trick is a little bit of honey and some marjoram. A little sweet, a little spicy. Like me, eh? my dad would say, narrating from behind the kitchen island. My mom would mutter uh-huh and roll her eyes even as she smiled.
I shift into my cooking trance easily. When my mind is juggling all the steps in a recipe, I can’t think about anything else. Well, I guess I could, but I’d screw up the food. Every time I finish one task—mix dough so it has time to rise, defrost pepperoni—my mind adds another task onto the end of the list. My hands have to move to keep up with the ongoing tasks. I like making a whole meal at once because it’s even more complicated than just an entrée. Tonight, I’ll make a salad and a dessert, too.
In the kitchen, my dad is still everywhere. In the wooden handles of the knives, in the heavy pizza stones. His hands touched these things a thousand times. I know it’s lame, but when I’m cooking, I can remember his voice most clearly. Jonah, try the julienne for those onions; good work, kid. You know what they say, son—a watched pot doesn’t boil, but an unwatched pot makes for soggy pasta. Keep an eye on that thing.
I’m not sure how much time passes as I finish prepping the pizzas and mixing the salad. Eventually, Bekah and Isaac bound into the living room to play a video game, and Silas leans on the kitchen island. I glance up at him from pitting cherries for black cherry cobbler.
“So, Leah really invited a friend over for dinner?” he asks. I knew he’d be surprised. We both worry about her.
When I nod, he says, “That’s awesome. Did she run into someone when you guys were out this morning?”
“Um, sort of. Met someone new at the pottery place.”