The Kitchen Daughter (33 page)

Once a month I go back to Dr. Stewart, and we talk about strategies. I’m modifying my behavior, one day at a time. I’m getting a little better at conversation. I fear it less. I don’t exactly smile—I tried that, it was a disaster—but I practice making my brow smooth and my body language open. I searched the Internet for some advice columns about how to do this. I work on not crossing my arms,
though I’m having trouble figuring out where to put them. If your hands don’t go in your pockets or on your waist, where do they go? Before, I never knew the word
akimbo. Akimbo
is on a page with
alacrity, Alamogordo
, and
alarm.

Amanda calls every day at least once. We don’t always talk about important things. But we talk. And sometimes she’ll bring the girls over here, or she’ll pick me up and take me to her house for dinner. If I go to her house I always take cookies. Parker loves the peanut butter cookies, the kind you stamp an X onto with the tines of a fork, which were her mother’s favorite too, when we were little. Shannon’s favorite are the lemon cream cheese drops, because she knows how to make them herself. All it takes is a box of cake mix, a block of cream cheese, and an egg. I still help her with the icing, and the oven. While they bake, we look through newspapers for new scraps to paste into her Normal Book.

I don’t have to move into Amanda’s house to be present in her family. Even though I’m not there physically all the time, I want them to have something that says,
I’m out here. I’m okay. I love you.
I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has a power. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my heart.

The doorbell rings. My guests are here.

I rest the wooden spoon on a plate alongside the simmering pot of ribollita, turn off the burner, and go to let them in.