She was a good plain cook of a kind that is disappearing, pot roasts and biscuits and a chicken and dumplings that made me understand things about comfort I had not previously understood, and she began, over those meals, to teach me — not gently, never gently, but really.

How to tell when a roast was done by the give of it.

How to make a gravy that didn’t break.

How her mother had done the biscuits, and her mother’s mother, a line of women reaching back through a recipe that had never once been written down and lived now only in Enid’s hands and, she had apparently decided, in mine.

I had grown up on drive-through and a mother who worked doubles and had no time to stand at a stove, and I had never known this, the slow daily craft of feeding people you love, and I did not tell Enid that she was giving me something I’d been hungry for in a way that had nothing to do with food.