Life From Scratch (41 page)

Ryan calls back almost immediately.

“Is he OK?” I can hear the fear in his voice. I do my best to strangle my own for his sake.

“The doctors are monitoring his heart. Can you come?”

“I’m stuck at work.” He works as a pizza deliverer for Papa John’s. Saturday is one of the busiest days of the week.

“Ryan, I know he would really like you to be here.”

Then I call Keith’s mother, three hours away in Geronimo and about to head to church. She listens carefully and then asks me to let her know what the doctors determine. There are so many heart issues in the family, including her husband’s four stents and her own pacemaker, that they don’t exhaust themselves with worry until they absolutely have to. As she hangs up, she adds that she’ll say an extra prayer for us in church today. She’s the essence of calm.

I thumb through my contacts for someone else to call.

If I could just find someone to watch Ava, I could be there with Keith and listen to the doctors to get a grip on what’s happening. Ava is nearly two years old, and I still haven’t let anyone babysit.

I try Vanessa: No answer. I consider Leona briefly. Our motorcycle days seem like a lifetime ago. Connor, Grace, Mom, and Tim are an airplane ride away.

I don’t know who else to call so I put my phone away. As I stare at my lap, I realize I still have my apron on. I tear it off, and then realize the hallway is too quiet.

I find Ava squatting in front of an electrical outlet down the hall, peering at it as though it were a work of art. I scoop her up and sprint back into Keith’s room. The only doctor left is looking over Keith’s ECG.

He explains that Keith is experiencing a severe case of atrial fibrillation. His heart was beating so slowly that he couldn’t breathe, so even the smallest steps left him winded. The doctor keeps talking and talking.

Ava starts chanting, “Eat, eat, eat.”

“So, it’s not a heart attack?” I say over her.

“No, but we told your husband this sort of episode is a sign of bad electricity in the heart. We can go into his heart with a laser, essentially burning a small section of it to get it in order again. There’s not much else we can do.” He pauses. “An episode like this may never happen again. But if it does, each one puts a strain on his heart. And in the long run, it will put him at an increased risk of stroke and heart attack.”

The doctor refers Keith to a physician who can give him a heart monitor. He’ll have to wear it for a week to find out if he needs the surgery.

For the first time I notice the sanitized, plastic hospital smell—the stench of death. I bite my lip. The diagnosis isn’t terrible, I tell myself. It’s the rest that I don’t know how to deal with.

I don’t want to tell Keith that Ryan isn’t coming. As I smooth over the stiff cotton sheets at the edge of his bed, I find myself desperate to run away, as far and as fast as my feet could take me from this sanitized room where even the doctors have no control.

When we get home, I coat the German Tree Cake in another sheathing of apricot jam and, finally, the chocolate glaze. I am on autopilot, unwilling to reveal my fear to Ava, unwilling to add to Keith’s stress. As I work, I realize why Mom always had us make this cake, even though we weren’t German, even though the ingredients were expensive. This cake was a walking meditation. Step-by-step, one foot in front of the other, it was a sheer exercise in willpower—an edible prayer.

Like Mom, I crush the almonds and press them into the sides. I can still see her small hands pressing them over the smooth chocolate and then slicing the cake into wedges, revealing the 21 layers beneath. Michael and I ate that cake with the kind of hunger that comes from waiting for a good thing a little longer than expected.

Later, when Keith and Ava eat it, I smile, knowing that I have not only fed them: I have kept going.

Within the month, Keith has worn the monitor and seen the specialist, who determines that he doesn’t need surgery. In fact, the doctor doesn’t detect any atrial fibrillation. He’s lucky, she says: This episode might have been his last. She even cancels Keith’s prescription for Lanoxin, a drug sometimes used to treat abnormal heart rhythms. Friends tell me I should have called, that I
could
have called. Even my family halfway across the country tells me I should have called. I want to believe them, but I find myself shaking my head: “Don’t bother, I’ll be fine.” A veritable martyr in training.

But the hospital visit shows me the reality of living without a support system. In hindsight, my reluctance to bother other people feels foolish, and I wonder if it’s the reason that in the six years since I moved to Tulsa, I’ve met a lot of people but not made many close friends or taken the time to meet my neighbors.

“I’m not going to hound someone with my problems,” I tell Keith. “People get
tired
of problems.” It’s easier not to make friends than to risk rejection.

A couple months later, Keith and I are sitting in the living room, each on one end of the couch, facing each other. Ava is dancing around the coffee table. When she slips in the narrow alley between furniture, I declare that it’s high time for us to move. I try to make my voice enthusiastic and controlled, the same way Pierre did years earlier when announcing each of our new destinations.

“This was my bachelorette pad,” I tell Keith. “We need a
family
home now—some space.”

I cite our swaybacked roof and crumbling driveway as further evidence. I point out that we cannot even open the front picture window and get a breeze. “The air feels
stuck
in this place.”

Keith doesn’t immediately shut me down. When he asks where we should go, he crosses his arms and tilts his head back, listening. I shrug as though I’m not sure. But I am.

Before he can object, I rattle off my ideas, starting with the East Coast: near my mom in Boston, or my sister in New Jersey. I even suggest Virginia, near my brother Connor, or Florida, near my brother Tim.

“I didn’t realize you were homesick,” he says, a sad look on his face.

“I’m not,” I say, but the words feel like a lie. “We don’t even know our neighbors and …” I clear my throat and start again. “What would I even be homesick for? Boston? Atlanta? France or Luxembourg? This isn’t about clicking my heels three times to get back to some childhood home. I don’t think the homesickness of a perpetual wanderer can ever be quenched.”

“Well,” Keith considers. “I’d have to find a new job.”

“You’d do that?” I shift in my seat. It feels as though he’s called my bluff. I cannot figure out why his willingness to move bothers me. Perhaps it’s because I could never live near all of my family at the same time. We’re too spread out. But—no, that’s not it. Not entirely.

“If you’re going to go to all that trouble,” I say, changing tactics, “let’s go somewhere exotic.”

I walk over to the map and begin plucking names at random: a castle on the Italian Riviera, where Ava can play among grapevines; a tree house in Brazil so we can live in the clouds; a fale in Samoa where we can drink chocolate all day long.

“Thanks to the blog, we know we can eat well wherever we go,” I laugh, but the sound is hollow.

Keith falters. He wouldn’t know how to begin finding a job in Italy, he says, his reaction checked by equal parts realism and inexperience. He’s never lived anywhere but Oklahoma. His first time in the ocean or out of the country was with me, in his late 30s, when we vacationed in Mexico.

I press forward, suggesting England, or maybe Ireland. “You’ll know the language there,” I say, “even if the accent needs translating.”

“What’s really going on here, Sash?” he asks.

“Maybe I’m just in a slump,” I say, embarrassed to be craving something more when I literally have the world at my stove top.

But the truth is I’m exhausted. The end of the blog is still two forever years away. The list of recent and upcoming countries blurs and blends: When it comes to Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Guyana, I struggle to keep straight which of the “Guineas” and “Guyana” are in Africa and which is in South America.

In a few weeks I’ll be combining Haiti and Honduras, just to get them done before Mom’s next visit. It makes no sense from a culinary point of view.

Keith jumps up. “Hold that thought—I forgot to take my blood pressure medication.”

Though nothing changes in the room, I get a whiff of something sterile—the hospital. I realize with horror that the scent has been trailing me since Keith’s episode two months earlier.

I take a deep breath and slowly release it while glancing around the living room. A photo of Michael hugging me on the beach catches my eye. I must be two or three—he’s maybe five years old. He’s run behind me, leaped and wrapped his arms around my middle. Mine have flown up from the force. I’m laughing.

The scent grows stronger.

Just for a moment, I feel the police officer’s shoulder as he lifts me from my castle bed to the foster house. And then I smell the courts: ink, paper, marble. I taste the pound-cake goodbye, caught up with the smash of strawberry against sweet whipped cream. I can almost hear Mom’s footsteps crunching through the snow on her way to work on Michael’s card after he died. I never want to be that alone. Even cooking the world cannot compete with this hard reality.

When Keith sits back down, I turn to face him completely.

“I–I just don’t want you to get sick again and …” I bite my lip. “And ruin our happy ending.” I don’t look him in the eyes when I say the words. Instead, I rest my head on his chest.

“Oh, Sash.” He doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then he picks me off his shoulder and looks into my eyes. He opens his mouth to speak, but before he does, I blurt out, “Can’t you just … live forever?”

He hugs me tight, and we rock slowly. “I’ll do my best.”

I put all my energy into renovating our faux Tuscan kitchen. We pay a friend to paint the dark wood cabinets antique white, lightening the windowless room. I donate three boxes of kitchen gadgets, and when the kitchen sparkles, I ask Keith to drill through the faux finish so we can hang the Afghan stirring pot on the wall.

I use it more than any other pot, and it’s time it had a place of its own.