Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates Page B

and learned how to make mac and cheese, sloppy joes with ground turkey, and spaghetti and meatballs. I found a meat grinder that cost almostnothing at a yard sale. Grinding my own beef cut down on the cost of making lasagna, meat loaf, homemade hamburgers and chili. When we had almost nothing to spend I cooked up a large pot of red lentil soup, which my brother called stupid hippie food, but he still finished his bowl every time, and if we had a little extra cash come Friday, I roasted a chicken on the weekend, making stock from the carcass and using up the leftover meat during the following week. I could turn one chicken into three meals for three, which made me realize what good value that bird had been, and we started eating roast chicken every Sunday, our new family triangle experiencing something like happiness as we shared our weekends at that dinner table. I learned how to bake bread, each loaf costing me only a few cents to make, and then figured out that adding milk to my dough kept the bread softer for longer and started using it to make toast for breakfast and sandwiches to take to school. My brother refused to give up his morning cereal and that was a big dent in my budget—until he left for college, that is, although whenever he came home I had to make sure we had his damn Cheerios in the pantry—but mostly I’d say that my brother supported me. He could have called me a little fag for liking to cook (his favorite term of abuse back then) but he never did.
    I loved every second I spent in that kitchen—almost three years, from the age of fifteen until shortly after my eighteenth birthday when I left for college as well.
    When you cook you can silence your mind for a while. You never feel sad or down when the heat starts to rise in front of a busy stove. I suppose that somehow I had stumbled upon exactly what I needed, the ability to unplug from life for a while—and not only the small world outside but also the larger world spinning twice as fast in my head.
    Another thing I loved was the sense of transformation. I would line up my ingredients on the kitchen counter and draw a picture in my head of what these different elements were about to become. Sure, maybe I’d never get all the way to that picture, but I always got somewhere, the journey ended with a reward every time.
    But what I liked most of all about cooking was simple. I hadlearned to make people happy. I’d discovered that food does not have to be only sustenance, food can be love.
    *   *   *
    WHICH IS ALL PERFECTLY WONDERFUL —I’m sure everyone needs to escape from the world sometimes and perhaps I’d found the best way to buy myself a few hours’ silence each day, which was something I desperately needed because, every moment since it had happened, the story of that hot yellow day had been playing on loop in my mind, reeling away at the back of my skull like a home movie being projected in Technicolor over and over.
    Baked orange bicycles, bright rocks and blue skies, black rat snake, Red Ryder BB gun …
    Even when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, I was aware of the story whirling away, mindful of the background noise of my shame, the sound like the buzz of a neighbor’s television set coming through the walls. When I did think about it, watching the events unfold behind my eyes, reliving that day again, the story would stick to the very same script every time—but only up to a point, because then, as the story neared its factual climax, it would take on a fictional twist. Yes, whenever I told the tale to myself, the ending would be different, a new sting in the tail each time. Patch running at Matthew and crushing his skull with a rock, Patch leaping in front of the forty-ninth bullet, Patch finding a splintered branch and driving it deep into Matthew’s chest, Patch fetching the slingshot from under the tarp and firing a perfect shot into Matthew’s