“You know how to measure flour?” I asked as she dragged a step stool over to the counter.
“I know fractions.” She didn’t say duh, but it was implied.
“Right.” I may have also implied a duh. A point for her, though, for not rolling her eyes.
“Can you hand me the apron hanging next to Daddy’s?” she asked, pointing toward the hooks by the back door.
There was indeed a small apron and a large apron. All that was needed was a medium-sized apron to make it the perfect Three Little Bears house.
I limped over to the apron, realizing after a couple of steps that I didn’t need to limp. That baking soda had really done the trick. Since Polly was watching me, I turned the limp into a little sashay.
“Do you always dance when you bake pies?” she asked.
“You don’t?” I asked her right back, deadpan.
“I’ve never baked before.” She thought a moment. “I like the pie dance.”
I grinned and handed her the apron. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll tell you what goes into the bowl, and you can measure. I’ll cut up the butter since the knife is very, very sharp, but you can add it in when we’re ready. Deal?”
“Deal,” she said excitedly. “Where’s the recipe?”
I pointed to my head. “It’s all up here.”
We got to work, and after a while we had a bowl full of sliced strawberries with some lemon juice, another bowl filled with perfectly measured flour, salt, and sugar, and now Polly was adding my uniformly cut-up butter to the dry ingredients.
She questioned everything: Why was there salt in a piecrust? Why did the butter need to be so cold? She also seemed to appreciate the way I made each cube even and straight, all looking the same. Good girl.
“Okay, now press down on everything with this pastry cutter. It’ll mix the flour and butter together, and then we can add the ice water.”
“Ice water? In a pie?” she asked.
“Remember what I said about using cold ingredients for pastry dough?”
“The colder the ingredients, the flakier the crust,” she repeated, with my exact inflection and tone.
I had to smile.
“How’re we doing in here?” Leo asked, filching a strawberry from the bowl. I swatted his hand, making him laugh. As he ate the berry, he made a face. “Why are these so sour?”
“Because I haven’t added the honey yet. That’s why you can’t sneak a bite till the chef says you can,” I said, reaching for a jar of local honey.
Polly watched it all with wide eyes, then returned to her pastry cutting. Her little wrist turned over and over again in the bowl, her tongue peeking out the side of her mouth as she worked. I was suddenly struck by a vision of Leo doing this exact thing, when he was packing up a farm box on a busy Saturday.
“Bees make honey, you know. You sure you aren’t scared?” Polly asked with a cheeky grin.
I felt my face heat up.
“Can it, Pork Chop; quit making fun of Roxie,” Leo said. “Say you’re sorry.”
She looked down at the bowl. “Sorry,” she said, her voice meek.
“No big deal,” I answered, drizzling some honey over the berries. After tossing them a bit, I told Leo, “Try another one; see what you think.”
He closed his mouth around a berry. “Mmm.”
My cheeks heated again. The last time I heard him say mmm, he was enjoying something else entirely.
“My arm’s tired. Is this almost done?” Polly asked, rubbing her shoulder.
I peeked over her shoulder to look in the bowl. “Looking pretty good. See how those in the corner are the size of peas?”
“There are no corners in a bowl—it’s a circle.” She must have caught a glance from Leo then, because she changed her tone. “Oh yeah, pea sized. I see.”
“Make them all that size, and we’re good to go.” I began to tidy up. “A good cook always cleans as she goes.”
I got a big thumbs-up from Leo on that one. He seemed more relaxed than he was earlier, more at ease with having me in his home, and around his daughter. I wished I felt the same way.
Outwardly I was calm, but inside I was still coming apart at the seams. Processing. Thinking. Second-guessing. Imagining.
And as Polly concentrated on her pea-sized dough blobs, Leo and I had a silent conversation across the island counter.
What the hell, my face said.
Later, his face replied.
Oh, you can count on that, my face assured.
His face responded with either, We can talk later, or We can fuck later. Oddly, they both looked the same.
In the meantime, however, there was an After all, I’m seven years old in the room, and we had a pie to finish.
In the end, a pie was made. Polly was great with a rolling pin, and when the crust tore a little bit, which was normal, she listened patiently as I taught her how to wet her fingers and pinch and smooth it back together. She asked if, when that happened, if it was a good time to dance, and I agreed. So we paused for thirty seconds for an impromptu dance break, to Leo’s great delight. Polly didn’t understand why he laughed so hard, and told him, “Daddy, dancing helps sometimes.” How could he argue with that?
He stayed in the background mostly, fielding phone calls on occasion. I was getting the sense that his taking the day off was unexpected, and I wondered for the millionth time where Polly had been, and why she’d suddenly appeared. The note he’d left in my bed this morning referenced moving cows, gathering strawberries, and getting me green. Nowhere was anything mentioned about daughters piggyback riding.