Simple Recipes Read Free Page B

cookswithout thinking because this is the task that comes to him effortlessly. He smiles down at me, but when he does this, it
     somehow breaks the spell. My father stands in place, hands dropping to his sides as if he has forgotten what he was doing
     mid-motion. On the walls, the paint is peeling and the floor, unswept in days, leaves little pieces of dirt stuck to our feet.
    My persistence, I think, my unadulterated love, confuse him. With each passing day, he knows I will find it harder to ignore
     what I can’t comprehend, that I will be unable to separate one part of him from another. The unconditional quality of my love
     for him will not last forever, just as my brother’s did not. My father stands in the middle of the kitchen, unsure. Eventually,
     my mother comes downstairs again and puts her arms around him and holds him, whispering something to him, words that to me
     are meaningless and incomprehensible. But she offers them to him, sound after sound, in a language that was stolen from some
     other place, until he drops his head and remembers where he is.
    Later on, I lean against the door frame upstairs and listen to the sound of a metal fork scraping against a dish. My mother
     is already there, her voice rising and falling. She is moving the fork across the plate, offering my brother pieces of French
     toast.
    I move towards the bed, the carpet scratchy, until I can touch the wooden bed-frame with my hands.My mother is seated there, and I go to her, reaching my fingers out to the buttons on her cuff and twisting them over to catch
     the light.
    “Are you eating?” I ask my brother.
    He starts to cry. I look at him, his face half hidden in the blankets.
    “Try and eat,” my mother says softly.
    He only cries harder but there isn’t any sound. The pattern of sunlight on his blanket moves with his body. His hair is pasted
     down with sweat and his head moves forward and backward like an old man’s.
    At some point I know my father is standing at the entrance of the room but I cannot turn to look at him. I want to stay where
     I am, facing the wall. I’m afraid that if I turn around and go to him, I will be complicit, accepting a portion of guilt,
     no matter how small that piece. I do not know how to prevent this from happening again, though now I know, in the end, it
     will break us apart. This violence will turn all my love to shame and grief. So I stand there, not looking at him or my brother.
     Even my father, the magician, who can make something beautiful out of nothing, he just stands and watches.
    A face changes over time, it becomes clearer. In my father’s face, I have seen everything pass. Anger that has stripped it
     of anything recognizable, so that it isonly a face of bones and skin. And then, at other times, so much pain that it is unbearable, his face so full of grief it
     might dissolve. How to reconcile all that I know of him and still love him? For a long time, I thought it was not possible.
     When I was a child, I did not love my father because he was complicated, because he was human, because he needed me to. A
     child does not know yet how to love a person that way.
    How simple it should be. Warm water running over, the feel of the grains between my hands, the sound of it like stones running
     along the pavement. My father would rinse the rice over and over, sifting it between his fingertips, searching for the impurities,
     pulling them out. A speck, barely visible, resting on the tip of his finger.
    If there were some recourse, I would take it. A cupful of grains in my open hand, a smoothing out, finding the impurities,
     then removing them piece by piece. And then, to be satisfied with what remains.
    Somewhere in my memory, a fish in the sink is dying slowly. My father and I watch as the water runs down.

Four Days from Oregon

    I
    O nce, in the middle of the night, our mother Irene sat on our bed and listed off the ways she was unhappy. She looked out the
     window and stroked our