Shawn knows everything there is to know about Finnish pancakes, and he’s not even Finnish. “It’s time,” was what Nik Saarinen had said to Shawn that evening after closing twenty years ago, back when Shawn was only a line cook at Kahvila, just out of high school and with no plans for the future other than buying a case of beer for the weekend and having sex with Nik’s oldest daughter. “It’s important that you understand the history that has gone into this recipe,” Nik added solemnly as he led Shawn into the kitchen and showed him his secret pancake recipe, the one he had brought with him from Finland when he and his wife, Lilja, were young and broke and full of dreams, with a three-year-old child and another on the way, and nothing more than a pancake recipe in their back pocket.

Shawn nodded, out of a desire to keep his job and his girlfriend, trying to pay attention as Nik talked about his great-great-grandmother and how hard it had been for her to find eggs. Looking back, Shawn thinks that what Nik should have told him was not that the recipe had a past but that it had a future. And its future was with Shawn till death do they part, forever and ever, amen.

Eggs, milk, salt, sugar, flour, butter. He’s allowed to divulge that much of Nik’s secret recipe. “Anything more and I’d have to kill you,” he always jokes. He can’t even eat them anymore. It’s like tasting his own death.

Despite this, it is still in the Kahvila kitchen where he feels most like himself – in the zone and focused only on the incoming tickets, the mixing, the pouring, the flipping, the rhythm of it all, not thinking about anything except the next table, the next ticket. And so even though his assistant manager, Dawn, is covering the dinner shift for him, he drives to Kahvila after he leaves the hospital. He knows he should want to be with his family, and he will. He can’t wait to see the boys, to pick them both up in his arms at once and turn them upside down and shake everything out of them, and he can’t wait to crawl into bed next to his wife and sleep with her cool back against his chest. But first, he needs to get his head straight. He needs to make pancakes.