Matthias sidled up to Grandma as she prepared the dish; her famous fettuccine Alfredo made from “the scratch,” as she would affectionately put it.
“The key to good fettuccine is the sauce,” the aging woman said with considerable warmth. Matthias, ever the student, leaned in closely as his Grandmother poured the 2% milk directly from the gallon into a bowl of already cooked noodles. Matthias licked his chops as he knew the meal was nearly finished.
“One final touch, my dear boy,” his Grandma said, carefully placing an entire stick of butter on top of the dish.
With sweat dripping from the tip of her nose, the old woman, still full of life, pushed the plate toward Matthias, signifying that it was time to go eat.
In the back of Dale’s mind, there persisted one overarching question that had haunted him his entire life: Does my wife love me? Certainly he’d loved her since the first moment he saw her 15 years ago, but sometimes he couldn’t escape the feeling that his wife, Noel, had merely settled with him on account of their son being born.
Sometimes Dale wondered if, at this point, it even really mattered or not. Life was good, good enough at least. And yet sometimes when his wife looked at him across the dinner table, he thought he saw contempt in her eyes. Just last week, after preparing her famous meatloaf—made to perfection by tossing a frozen meat chunk into a big clear dish with a bunch of ketchup, a few slices of sourdough, several uncut onions, and an entire pepper grinder before letting it roast in the oven for an indeterminate amount of time—he sensed a tension that was new. Forcing Dale to again ask himself the question that he’d asked so many times before: Does this woman love me?
Even as a young teenager, Matthias knew that if you wanted to make an omelet, you had to crack a dozen eggs. And the same was true of life, wasn't it? So when he thrust the first egg with the palm of his hand into the bone-dry skillet, letting the shell spread throughout the pan, creating that inimitable omelet crunch, he knew that soon enough, the time would come where he was going to have to stand up to his bully. Just as the first six eggs began to harden in the pan, Matthias' plan to confront his tormentor began to form.
Maybe this is how it was always supposed to be, Dale thought. Maybe there wasn’t more to life than a man, standing in front of a grill, fretting over his marriage and his child’s schoolyard fistfights while he rubbed charcoal all over his burgers and hot dogs to give them that special smoky flavor.
As he wadded up old newspaper and shoved it into the bottom of the grill, dousing it with lighter fluid, another thought came over him. Yes, this is what life was supposed to be like and that’s okay.
For Noel, the whole thing had been a lark really. She’d gone on a date with Dale all those years ago because she’d liked his shoes, nothing more. The fact that they’d made love that night had less to do with Dale being smooth and more to do with Noel’s just not wanting to go home. From there, Matthias had come, and then marriage, not in the order she would have liked but who gave a damn really? Her love for Dale had come a little later, but thank God it had come at all. From there, it was the house, the diapers, the parties, the television shows, and the cookies they’d made as a family.
On Sunday nights, they made cookies, and each family member had their own specific task. Dale would fill the trusty casserole dish with two inches of cooking oil and then float peanut butter on top of the slick surface. Noel would dump three bags of flour on top of that, and Matthias, sweet little Matthias, would add an entire can of chocolate chips to the top. The cookies always turned out wonderfully, but it was the routine and the time with family, each time reaffirming that they all had their parts to play, that Noel appreciated most.
Looking down at his mother’s casket, Dale felt a whirlwind of emotions. The last words he had said to his mother were, “Ma, how do you make a pizza?” To which the old woman had responded, “With time and patience,” before continuing, “and by taking a loaf of bread, putting a heavy dictionary on top of it, then squashing tomatoes with your hands directly onto the bread afterwards, put whatever meats and cheeses you have in your refrigerator on it and then let it bake in the sun for a few hours. Then, my boy, you feast.”
With a stomach full of sadness and his wife and son in tow, feasting was about the last thing on Dale’s mind. But tonight, for Ma, he’d try his hand at that old recipe and he knew that by the time it was fully cooked, he’d be hungry. They all would be.