Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
“I thought we were going to buy a new oven,” Flo said as she watched me approach the old kitchen range like I was approaching a sleeping grizzly bear.
I had planned to buy a new oven, until I saw the prices. Fixing up the basics of our house had been pricey, and I was short of cash—especially with Christmas coming. It had been Doris who suggested I get over my fear of the existing kitchen range and save the money.
“What do you need a new one for, you’ve got a great one already. You got any idea what people pay for wood-burning stoves like those?” she’d said last time she’d popped by.
I had no idea what people paid, but I looked it up.
Some of them were well over ten thousand dollars.
At first, I considered selling it—I could do a lot with that money—but then I remembered Jake’s comment about houses losing their identity when they were modernized too much.
The range was part of the house, and in some way, I felt selling it would be like ripping the heart out of the house.
I’d grown attached to the big sleeping dragon of a thing.
“I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have dials,” Flo told me now as I inspected the range. It was a gusty, rainy Saturday and the rain was lashing at the tall kitchen windows.
“People have cooked on these for hundreds of years,” I said reassuringly, trying to soothe myself more than her. “How hard can it be?”
“Oh my God, Mom. People used to go to the toilet in pots they kept under their beds. I really don’t think we should look to the past for solutions. The black-and-white times were nasty.”
I ignored that. “I watched some YouTube videos. I don’t think it’s that hard. Look, this here’s the firebox.” I pointed. “You make the fire in there. Easy.”
“Is it easy?” Flo groaned. “Let’s just microwave things.”
“We can do this,” I told her firmly. “I believe in us.” I showed her where the ash drawer was and the baking oven. “Just imagine the cakes we can bake.”
She perked up at that. “Can cake be the first thing we bake?”
“Sure.” Anything to get her on board. “And we’ll make the best Christmas turkey ever.”
“Followed by more cake.”
I rolled my eyes. But at least she was involved now.
“What’s this handle?” she asked, yanking on a handle between the cooktop and the firebox.
“I think that’s the chimney bypass?” I bit my lip. “It pumps the heat around… or you can shut the heat off, cooling the oven down. Maybe we should watch another video…” I was feeling out of my depth.
Flo fetched my laptop and we watched a couple of homemade instructional videos for antique wood oven ranges. Then Flo moved on to videos about how to bake cakes in one and left me to play with the range.
I fetched well-seasoned hardwood from outside and started a fire in the firebox.
“Hey!” Flo suddenly yelped. “Did you make sure the pipe thing was clean? This lady said she set fire to her kitchen by not cleaning her pipe thing.”
My heart stopped. Then I remembered that Jake had checked it when he’d done the chimneys. “Just in case,” he’d said, winking at me. I’d scoffed, sure there was no way I’d ever be using the ancient thing.
“It’s fine.” I breathed out shakily, glad to see the flue was working and the kitchen wasn’t filling with smoke. “Shall we start by using the stovetop?” I suggested nervously. “We could boil some water?”
“No, look, this video says pancakes are the best thing to start with.” Flo was gleeful.
“Seriously?” I was dubious, but she showed me the video. Sure enough, the guy on the screen showed how pancakes were perfect to teach you how to play around with the bypass to control the temperature. “Okay then, let’s do this.”
Together we whipped up the batter, and I gave Flo a long lecture about how hot the stove was and how to be safe around it. She rolled her eyes at me a lot, but I could tell she was listening.
Our first pancakes were a total disaster.
It was around our third batch of batter that we got the hang of it.
I’d never felt such a sense of triumph as I did regarding the perfect stack of fluffy golden pancakes at the end of the afternoon.
Flo was grinning ear to ear as she high-fived me.
She was grinning even more as she poured syrup all over the pancakes and scarfed them down.
“I can’t wait to tell Doris we did it!” I said, feeling giddy. I’d mastered the range! All by myself. Well, with Flo’s help, but mostly by myself. I felt indescribably proud. We’d had a lot of help with the house so far, but this we’d done all by ourselves.
“Don’t tell her,” Florence urged, high on sugar. “Let’s not tell anyone. Let’s just ask everyone around to dinner and serve them the best meal they’ve ever had and act all casual, like, ‘Oh, this? Yes, we just whipped it up on our black-and-white times stove.’ ”
I laughed. But then I considered it. “You know what? Yes!”
Flo’s eyes widened. “What? Really?”
“Yes, let’s have a dinner party! And we won’t tell them until afterward that we cooked dinner on the range.”
She was excited. “What should we cook?”
“Something easy.” I giggled. “I don’t want to serve them charred food.”
We ate pancakes for dinner and searched for recipes online. And a week later, after a lot of practice and a bunch of both burned and half-raw attempts, Flo and I had mastered roasting a chicken and baking a simple chocolate cake.
We invited all our neighbors, set the dining table with our newly polished silver cutlery, and set out the mismatched wineglasses. The house smelled gloriously of roasting chicken and Flo had iced our cake with about three inches of frosting.
And there was nothing better in the world than the laughter and applause from our neighbors, or Jake’s warm, proud gaze, when we showed them where we’d cooked our masterpieces. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so good in my life.