Mother’s Gravy

Carmelene Melanie Siani

 

“This tastes just like my mother’s gravy,” he said, spooning even more over his mashed potatoes.

 

Of course, I knew the gravy I’d made with the fried chicken tasted just like his mother’s. That’s why I made it. With milk. Exactly the way she’d made it all those 60-some years ago when she’d shared the recipe with me.

 

It’s not like she really wanted to share it with me. More that I’d cajoled and flattered her into it. After all, I was the loud Italian girl she’d considered not good enough for her boy to marry.

 

In the end though, I was the one she finally tolerated and maybe even accepted. The one who, despite all that “Eye-talian” cooking, she finally shared her milk gravy recipe with so her Donnie could have it with his fried chicken.

 

I had dozens of her recipes, written in her shaky hand on those little 3 x 5 recipe cards that housewives back in the day kept on their kitchen counters. I had them all saved in my own cookbook where I kept all those American recipes from friends and neighbors.

 

Truth is, I really didn’t know how to cook anything but Italian food — my mother was from Italy after all — she put garlic and peppers on hot dogs.

 

Sad to say, I accidentally sold that old collection of recipes I’d cherished and saved in my cookbook. Since those old milky-gravy days I’d moved so many times and had so many yard sales that by the time I moved the last time, I’d accidentally included it in a yard sale.

I’m sad I don’t have that old cookbook anymore. Actually, I don’t really think of it as an old cookbook so much as a historical artifact — one that held the trajectory of my marriage and divorce from Donnie.

 

Two husbands and many decades later, it was that very same Donnie who sat across the table from me now — all 87 years of him, his back permanently bent, his bedhead hair uncombed, his hands shaky from pain meds, his life partner of 30 years having recently died from kidney cancer — greedily spooning milk gravy onto his mashed potatoes.

 

“This tastes just like my mother’s gravy.”

 

Of course it did. Because it was.

 

Carmelene Melanie Siani’s widely published stories on family, caregiving, grief, late-life love and more. Find her at www.facebook.com/StoryBelly