I spent six hours in the kitchen that day. Not the casual kind of cooking where you’re half-watching television while stirring a pot, but the intense, focused kind where every minute counts and every detail matters. Six hours of chopping vegetables into precise pieces, peeling potatoes until my fingers pruned, sautéing onions until they turned translucent and golden, basting the chicken every fifteen minutes so the skin would crisp just right, stirring sauces that required constant attention to avoid burning, and cleaning as I went so the chaos wouldn’t overwhelm me.
I’d started planning this dinner two weeks earlier. My family was gathering for one of those obligatory get-togethers that happen several times a year, and somehow—as always—I’d been the one to volunteer to host. Or maybe I hadn’t volunteered at all. Maybe it had just been assumed, the way gravity is assumed, that I would take care of everything.
