Of course I can still bring to mind what was on that table, Miss. If I cooked it, then it’s worth remembering. Any cook worth her salt will tell you that, Miss.

More beef roasts followed, as did beef stews—Pat liked his with carrots and parsnips but not potatoes—and beefsteaks. Porterhouse and tenderloins were the cuts that he preferred.

For a man who never went into the kitchen except to tell me a story, Pat had very particular ideas about how foodstuff should be prepared. If the stew meat wasn’t as tender as he’d like, he would remind me that I should never add raw meat to a pot of hot broth or water. Always best to start the meat in cold liquids, Mattie. This is true whether the meat is fresh or dried, smoked or salted, he added.

I’d never heard of such a thing. Have you, Miss?

Well, you’ve that in common with Pat then. He didn’t know much about cooking either.

I heard Charlotte’s warning in my head whenever Pat would offer up another of his cooking remarks. They weren’t cooking advice because you can’t give advice about a skill that you don’t have.

I disagree, Miss. I never did the same to Pat.

My “advice,” if that’s what you want to call it, wasn’t about his writing. They were about his storytelling. I can tell stories too, Miss. Writing was what Pat did for a living, and I never presumed to tell him how to make his living.

Pat had kept his promises to me. I was his wife. I was no longer working in someone else’s kitchen. I was taking care of Bill, as I’d promised Aunt Sweetie that I would. In exchange, I listened to Pat’s remarks.

About soup making—I, who made a tureen of soup for a table of eight every night for over four years.

About how I needed to garnish the dishes I served to him with lemon slices, parsley sprigs, or mint leaves—a plate of food isn’t a hat, I’d wanted to say to him.

About when to add sugar to the eggs in a cake batter—before the eggs are beaten, he said.

“Is that so?” I’d say. Or “Now, why didn’t Molly teach me that?” Or “I’ll do that next time, Pat.”

I confided to Charlotte, then the mother of a baby crawling on his chubby limbs, that my spirits were low. Pat and I had been man and wife for about a year, and the southern Ohio heat arriving too early that summer was making me lose patience.

“I don’t care if he dines elsewhere, Charlotte,” I said. “It would be a relief,” I admitted.

“Where would you go, Alethea?” asked Charlotte. She was already in the family way again—the second one would also be a boy. She spoke plain and with an ear for the truth more than ever before. Being with her made me want to do the same. She didn’t have to ask where Bill would go because she knew that, no matter what happened, he would be with me.