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don’t you just sit down and keep me company while I throw things together?”
    I could see Kat was relieved. “Thanks.” She pulled out a chair to face me and sat. “My luck, I’d probably make a mess or break somethin’, anyway.”
    Maybe it was her transparency, but I heard myself confide, “I had to learn to cook when I was little. My mother was too sick to do it. I started making recipes from the paper when I was only eight.”
    Sympathy clouded Kat’s features. “Wow. Is yer mama okay now?”
    “Managing,” I said, wondering why I was telling her. “I still bring her food.”
    “In Atlanta.”
    “Yeah. Off Defoors.” Too much, I’d told too much. I didn’t even know this woman. “How about you? Is your mother living?”
    Kat shrugged. “Beats me. She drank a lot, and it made her mean. Then she took off when I was twelve. Daddy did everything after that, but it broke his heart. He’d cussed liquor so long because of Mama, but after she left, he took to drink too. I tried to help him, but it never worked. Finally it got so bad, I took off and headed for Tenth Street.”
    I’d been tempted a thousand times to leave Mama, but never had the courage to do it on my own. “How did you manage?”
    Kat grinned. “I met Zach the first day. The rest is history.”
    Minus a little thing called a wedding. I put a couple of strips of bacon into the boiling butter peas, then washed my hands and got out the cutting board to make the salad. “Do you like green peppers in your salad?”
    She colored, her glance shifting to the side. “Well … I like them, but they don’t like me, if you git my drift.”
    “That’s okay. I’ll leave them out.” I reached for my little food diary and opened it to K for Kat, then wrote her name, with “no green peppers” underneath.
    “What’s that?” Kat asked, alert.
    “A list of what everybody does and doesn’t like to eat, so I won’t ever serve them the wrong things.”
    Kat’s expression was a mixture of awe and this woman doesn’t have enough to do.
    “Anything else y’all don’t like?” I asked her, pen poised.
    “Onions, actually.” She leaned forward to confide, “They make me fart like a biker at a bean-eatin’ contest.”
    I couldn’t help laughing. She was crass, but frankly funny.
    I couldn’t imagine being so honest. Didn’t she know that people could use that to hurt her? “Okay. No onions for you.” I wrote them down, then skipped to the middle of the page and wrote Zach’s name. “What about Zach?”
    “Zach’ll eat anything,” Kat said. “Even snails .” The last came with a shudder. “But me … no insects. Not that you’d serve ’em, of course,” she qualified. “And I cain’t stand guts of any form. No chitlins or liver or brains or anything, no matter what kinda animal it comes from. I’d probably be glad to git ’em if I was starvin’ to death, but otherwise, n-o .” She smiled. “That’s about it fer me.”
    “I’m the same way about liver and all,” I said as I recorded the guts part, though I’d never thought of it in such crass terms. That done, I put the book back alongside The Joy of Cooking, then went to wash my hands.
    “You think that book up all by yourself?” Kat asked.
    I finished my handwashing ritual by drying thoroughly with a fresh white towel, then using some unscented lotion. I washed them so often, they chapped if I didn’t.
    “One of my home ec teachers told me about it,” I said. “She was really a great teacher.”
    Kat’s eyes narrowed. “I bet you were real good at school, weren’t you? All organized and everything.”
    Too much. Too many personal questions, too soon. I turned it around with, “How about you? Did you like school?”
    “Yep.” That was a surprise. “I love readin’,” she told me, “but I was a lot better in math. I was takin’ calculus before I quit tenth grade, but that was that.”
    The idea of Kat taking calculus in tenth grade seemed like a total