3. Jack
JACK
Chicken and dumplings. My new nemesis.
Flat, not fluffy. The way they’re supposed to be made.
The way Ivy’s mama made them. How was I to know what recipe she used?
Or if she used any at all. Maybe women born and raised in Tennessee came out of the womb knowing how to make the perfect broth and flat biscuits.
In Washington state, where I’d been raised, I couldn’t remember anyone making this dish.
But this woman who had stolen my heart this morning wanted chicken and dumplings and, God help me, I was going to make them for her.
I stood in my kitchen, sleeves rolled up, trying to make a dish worthy of Ivy James and not feeling entirely up to the task.
Flour coated the counter. Some had spilled on the floor, and my cat, Oscar, had come over to supervise and gotten his paws in it, so now there were kitty tracks all over my hardwood floors.
So far, I had a whole chicken cooling in a bowl.
Carrots, celery, and onion chopped fine, as instructed by the recipe.
My phone sat beside the stove, screen bright with three different recipes, none of which agreed with each other, except that the vegetables should be finely cut for the best texture.
One recipe had called for canned biscuits.
I’d closed that tab immediately. There was no way Ivy’s mama made them with biscuits from a can.
And, anyway, I knew how to make biscuits.
Only mine were fluffy, not flat. Flat dumplings were rolled thin, cut into strips, and dropped right into the broth.
Simple, supposedly. I put on plastic gloves to pull the chicken from the bone, dropping the meat back into the broth.
I’d been cooking since I was eight years old.
The last time my father left us had been in the evening while Mama was still at work, doing a double shift.
Luci was four and hungry for dinner. Mama wouldn’t be home for hours.
Even that young, I knew our daddy was not coming back this time.
Maybe it was the way he’d hopped on his motorcycle with the girl two trailers over from ours wrapped around his waist. I’d watched it all from the small porch of our trailer, holding onto the railing for dear life, rain falling steadily like it did in Stonehaven, Washington, during the month of March.
And I’d known. He wasn’t coming back this time. I was the man of the house now.
Luci, clutching her yellow blanket to her chest, had tugged at my sleeve and said her tummy was rumbly. So I pulled out my mother’s old Betty Crocker cookbook and asked Luci to tell me what was in the refrigerator. “We’ll find something to make.”
She’d padded obediently over to the refrigerator, yellow blanket dragging behind her, and told me what she saw. “Bologna. Tortillas. Cheese. But it has spots on it.”
“That’s just a little mold. We can work with it. I’ll just cut the bad parts off.”
Like I would later come to think about my father’s departure.
I hadn’t found any recipes that called for the ingredients we had in the trailer, so I improvised.
The bologna quesadilla was born that evening.
To this day, Luci and I always make a batch the first night we’re together.
We tried elevating the meat portion to prosciutto when I started making money, but it wasn’t the same.
We went right back to a good old-fashioned, wholly processed American bologna.
Luci told me it got her through medical school when she was broke.
“Ironic,” she’d said one time after she’d become a certified pediatrician, “since I tell my patients’ mothers to stay away from processed food.
If they only knew about eighty percent of me is bologna. ”
Now, I made a well in the flour, added salt, a little fat, and enough cold broth to bring the dough together. At first it clung to my fingers, but I added more flour and worked it gently. That was the trick, apparently. Handle it, but don’t over-handle it. Like a woman.
While I worked, I thought about my house and what Ivy would think when she saw it.
Would she notice the details the designer and I had chosen so carefully?
The white clapboard exterior with black-trimmed windows or the brick walkway lined with boxwoods and flowers I couldn’t name without checking the notes the landscaper had given me.
Would she take note of the wide front porch with rocking chairs set close enough for a conversation while a couple’s growing old together?
Would she notice how large it was for just one person?
I’d bought the house not for the life I had now, but the life I yearned for.
A house for a family. The family I never had growing up.
I saw it all unfold the moment I’d toured it with the broker.
The kitchen especially had won my heart.
White cabinets to the ceiling, brass fixtures and a marble island big enough for homework and cookie dough and family arguments over card games.
And a range built for feeding crowds. At the time, the designer had talked about flow and sight lines and entertaining, but I imagined Sunday family dinners rather than parties.
Grilling by the pool, kids splashing and shouting as they jumped into the water on a hot day.
Christmas in the big room with a tree tall enough to just skim the cathedral ceilings.
An angel on top of the tree that my wife and I had picked out for our first holiday together.
So far, it was just me and my cat Oscar.
He’d technically been my girlfriend Lisa’s cat, but she left us both for another man.
Now Oscar was my constant companion when I was home.
I know, it’s kind of sad that it’s just him and me in this big old house and that we both got left, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.
Lisa left, but I got Oscar out of the deal, so it was worth it.
When I was on the road, Marcus, my assistant and driver, who lives in the mother-in-law apartment on the property, took care of him.
It always took Oscar at least half a day to forgive me for leaving. But unlike my dad, I always came back.
My house was at the end of a long driveway, about forty-five minutes south of Nashville.
I’d wanted something out in the country, away from the lights and noise of the city.
But sometimes, when I was here alone at night, it felt too big and way too empty.
Even though Oscar did his best to keep me company, he wasn’t the same as a human woman.
Continuing my project, I rolled the dough thin, cut it into strips with a knife, and carried the board to the stove. I tasted the broth first. Not bad, but it needed another spoonful of salt. After I’d added that, I dropped the dumplings into the simmering broth. They sank, rose, and floated.
“Flat, not fluffy,” I told them. “Do not let me down.”
The dumplings did not answer, which I took as a good sign.
I turned the heat down until the broth barely simmered.
Every recipe agreed on one thing: do not boil the dumplings to death.
They needed to cook gentle and slow, soaking up the flavor without falling apart.
Which seemed simple enough until I was standing over the pot hoping for a biscuit miracle to impress the most beautiful woman in the world.
The first few minutes, nothing much happened. The strips floated there, pale and suspicious, looking more like scraps of an old flour sack than supper. I resisted the urge to stir them. One recipe had warned against that in all capital letters.
Instead, I nudged them carefully with the back of a spoon, making sure none of them stuck to the bottom. Steam rose up in clouds, smelling of chicken and black pepper and butter, making the kitchen suddenly smell like someone’s home instead of just a nicely decorated showpiece.
Oscar sat in the doorway, one paw still dusty with flour, watching me with a look in his green eyes that told me he thought I should have made bologna quesadillas instead.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “You should believe in me.”
He blinked.
“You eat those nasty smelling treats,” I said to him. “So don’t judge.”
After ten minutes, the broth had changed.
It wasn’t thin anymore, but thickened by the flour from the dumplings until it clung to the spoon in a way that looked right.
Not too heavy. Not gluey, God forbid. Just rich and golden, with pieces of chicken tucked between the vegetables and those flat little strips Ivy’s mother may have invented herself for all I knew.
I fished one dumpling out and set it on a saucer to cool, cut off one end with the side of my fork and tasted it. Tender, a little chewy, but not fluffy. Cooked all the way through too. “Thank you, Jesus,” I said out loud.
Oscar lifted his head and let out a long meow.
“I wasn’t thanking you.”
The dumplings needed a few more minutes, but not many.
I gave the pot one last gentle push with the spoon, then set the lid on crooked so steam could escape.
That was another thing the recipes disagreed about—lid on, lid off, lid half on, no lid at all.
I’d chosen halfway because it seemed like a good compromise.
I’d had no idea chicken and dumplings was so controversial.
The clock on the range read 6:46.
If the car left Nashville at 6, she would be here any minute. If she was on time, which I had the feeling she might not be.
I turned the burner down to its lowest setting. I’d ladle it out when she got here. All of the recipes had agreed about that too.