Morning tiptoed in while I was sitting up in bed, looking down at the live-streamed world. People carry their shoes along their walks of shame, sometimes stopping to retch in a trash can or the gutter; video baby monitors catch weary parents impatiently scooping crying children from behind the bars of their cribs, trying and failing to bounce them into another hour of sleep; the milk in someone’s fridge expired yesterday; rats scurry and scratch and fuck in some kind of warehouse.

The island coos, playing innocent. Gentle swells lap the shore; diffused light drifts through the window. I listen, hard, until I make my ears tickle with the strain. But no matter how hard I listen, the phone still doesn’t ring. The only thing I can hear is my stomach rumbling. Acid fumes rise up and bathe the back of my throat. I finished my pie yesterday and didn’t bother with dinner after Jason left. I’m going to have to make something. And I know exactly what. The perfection and sadness of it cancel each other out and I feel pretty neutral as I abandon my laptop, roll over onto the floor, and crawl to the stairs, roll down them in a tumbly ball, and walk into the kitchen. The fall hurts just enough.

Eggs out of the fridge to come up to room temperature, butter in a large bowl over the vents at the back of the stove, oven preheated to 350 degrees, flour sifted with a teaspoon of baking powder per cup. One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs.

It was a slave recipe that came down from my great-grandmother. My mom said that their recipes had to be simple because they weren’t allowed to learn to read. Not really an issue with cooking. Everybody can do that. Baking is all proportions and reactions and ratios. My mom always said that people who can’t cook are never really smart, never real adults. It was years before I gave this enough thought to realize that she was probably completely wrong about this. There’s probably no relationship between intelligence and cooking either way. She was wrong about lots of things, but I was only six or something and I didn’t know that then. Parents aren’t really that old. They don’t really know anything yet.

When my finger pokes easily into the butter I add the sugar and beat it until the mixture is pale lemon yellow and bubbly. Lick the beaters and then turn the mixer back on to add the eggs one by one. Fold in the flour, gently at first until I get bored and dump the rest in. “One third at a time. Don’t get impatient with it. You’ll get a sad streak.” That’s what my mother would say.