The bed of mashed potatoes transformed into cotton on which lay the relics of a murder victim’s autopsy. A naked woman lay face down on an examining table, with two deep, kidney-shaped holes in her lower back. I already had a hard enough time making incisions into meat, how was I supposed to get my fork prongs and knife’s teeth into an organ. I was unprepared. I hadn’t attended medical school.

“Oh! De best! De juice! Ah!” My mother rushed back to the kitchen.

“Juice” is a fine euphemism for “blood.” I grabbed a kidney with my fingers and panicked when I didn’t know what to do next.

“I’m going to tell!” warned Cecilia, “You better put it in your mouth right now.”

“Please, Cecilia! I’ll do anything!” I pleaded with her, my hands cupped in prayer, the kidney somewhere in between.

Nevertheless, she blurted, “Mommy!!”

“The record,” I reminded her in a ventriloquist whisper as my mother returned with the saucer and miniature ladle.

“You. Wha’ you wan’, you big mouth?” my mother covered her ears.

I never understood. My mother’s own mouth was nearer to her ears, yet it never hurt them when she was the one who did the screaming.

“Um, some salt, please …” muttered Cecilia.

“You don’ need no salt! Dere’s salt enough in natur’l Mot’her Nature! Don’ start now, you, too! Eat!”

I held the kidney under the table while I continued to fork the mashed potatoes into my mouth.

“Kate. I don’ wan’ see de cherry …”

I switched the mashed potatoes to my other cheek. As though I were scratching my neck, I dropped the kidney down the front of my dress. It remained caught in between the fabric and my chest, exactly in the middle like the birth of a unicorn breast.

Cecilia shot me a worried glance. I leaned over my plate so the slackening in the fabric would help it to descend.

“No elbows on de table! How many times mus’ I repeat myse’f?”

I straightened. The kidney landed on top of my skinny thighs. Getting up would pose a problem. The kidney would plop down on my mother’s plush cream carpet, and God knows what she would think. I pinched the fabric until I managed to get it in my underwear. The feeling of a greasy kidney against my bare skin was revolting. I balanced the second kidney on my fork, nothing in the world could get me to stab it, and brought it to my lips.

Looking at Cecilia, I mouthed, “Moussorgsky.”

I lowered it into the collar of my dress while my mother was “cleaning the serving platter,” that is, scraping the last crusty, oily bits and licking the spoon. She avoided eye contact with us whenever she did this, embarrassed about her table manners and, even worse, her broken diet. I stretched out the elastic waistband of my white Tuesday underwear, and the kidney fell inside.

After dinner, my mother armed herself for her nightly walk around the block with a towel to swat mosquitoes with, and an orange fluorescent flag to prevent hit-and-runs. She never gave a second’s thought to the latter until she heard a talk show about it and now it was a central preoccupation in her life, along with cholesterol, getting struck by lightning and holding your back straight when you picked up a box.