Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page A

my dad had trained me to sit through sporting events, it didn’t mean I understood them.
    â€œOh, now, don’t get huffy,” he said. “Your mother used to do that all the time, too, get huffy.”
    â€œMom never got huffy!”
    â€œOkay, but she had every right to get huffy and I could hear her carefully trying not to be huffy underneath her nonhuffiness which is almost the same thing.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œHey, I make sense to me. Don’t worry so much if I don’t make sense to you. Anyway—” he stirred the pasta in the pot “—all I’m saying is that if you’re going to gamble, you have to expect to lose occasionally, too, maybe lose big.”
    â€œWhatever.”
    Ever since I’d moved out, Monday night dinner had been an on-again, off-again tradition with us. When my dad was in a good mood about his prospects for the future because he’d recently won big, it was on. When he lost or was depressed about the future, it was off.
    At the time of my mother’s death, my dad knew how to cook exactly two things: he could boil water for instant coffee (“instant tastes like liquid dirt, Baby, but what are you gonna do?”) and s’mores (“they have all your major food groups”).
    â€œYour mother did everything for me,” he’d said at the time. “She even ironed my underwear. How will I ever survive without her?”
    â€œFor one thing, you’ll start wearing unironed underwear like normal people,” I’d said. “But you’re a grown man. Don’t you think it’s time you learned how to use the microwave?”
    â€œFeh,” he’d said. Whenever Jackie Mason played any of the casinos my dad was working, he’d always take time out to catch the show and some of the Borscht Belt lingo had worn off on him. He’d never pass Conchita and Rivera’s test of Portuguese-Spanish, but he could say gesundheit or schmuck with the best of them. “ Feh. I hate all that modern-technology mishegas. I’ll learn how to cook for myself. How hard can it be? Your mother always said if a person could read, a person could cook. I’m pretty sure I can read.”
    But his earliest efforts gave the lie to that.
    â€œIs pasta supposed to look like that?” he’d asked in dismay, showing me the contents of the pot—it was a cream-colored sodden mess without a complete noodle in sight.
    â€œYou bought gluten pasta,” I’d said, studying the box. “I think that maybe you weren’t supposed to cook it that long?”
    â€œShit,” he’d said. “I didn’t know pasta could melt.” Then he’d tossed it over the fence of the family home—he’d still lived there right after Mom’s death—into Mr. Finnigan’s yard.
    â€œBrownie’ll eat it,” he’d said, referring to Mr. Finnigan’s gray-and-white schnauzer. “That mutt’ll eat anything.”
    â€œI hope that stuff doesn’t kill him.”
    â€œI should be so lucky.”
    Then there was the time, that very same first year after Mom’s death, when he’d tried to make my birthday cake.
    â€œI wanted it to be so special for you,” he’d said.
    â€œI don’t think an angel cake is supposed to be charcoal-broiled, Dad.”
    â€œI wanted it to be so special for you,” he’d said again.
    â€œMaybe we can just scrape some of the black stuff off the outside and dunk the inside into the leftover pink frosting.”
    And that’s exactly what we did.
    But as time went on, my dad got better at it.
    â€œI found some of your mother’s old recipe cards! I can read! I can cook!”
    If not exactly a Julia Child or Emeril Lagasse, he could now do a lot more in a kitchen than I could, which may not be saying a lot but it was enough.
    And he knew my habits.
    â€œI’ve got the lasagna you like as