That is what a life comes down to, I think, in the last hour of it.

Not the medals or the money or the record of all you accomplished.

A taste.

A kitchen.

The feeling of being small and safe and loved by someone who is long gone.

I could not give Walt back his health, or his stolen years, or the family he deserved and did not get.

But I could stand at a stove at three in the morning and warm canned apples with too much cinnamon, and carry them to him, and watch his face do the thing it did — go, for a moment, all the way back to the beginning, to being someone’s cherished boy.

It was the last meal I ever made him and the worst thing I have ever cooked and I would not change one grain of the cinnamon.