Sublime

She looks like a half-finished painting, she observes, waiting for the artist to come back and add the detail.

Protective colouration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

Charlene Johnson-Hadley respected the iron law of the kitchen: A dish that is 90 percent finished has the same worth as a dish that is zero percent finished.

Yesterday’s bread has less moisture and so makes crisper toast.