That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

She’d stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father’s absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths.

She tried to explain it—how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same steps that her mother’s mother’s mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven’s heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

He’s always been one of those born-on-third-base-and-thinks-he-hit-a-triple types.

in a world where being born female meant spending years of your life at risk, and the rest of it invisible, existing as prey or barely existing at all.