Off the Menu by Stacey Ballis

him, and kiss his cheek, smooth-shaven and smelling of bay rum. “Hello, Papa.”
    “How you are doing, eh? No work meedle of day?” He shakes his hand up and down. “So fancy!”
    “Got done early, thought I’d come make pelmeni with Mama.”
    He smiles even wider, closes his eyes and inhales deeply, as if he can already smell the little meat dumplings, swimming in butter and onions and dunked in rich, thick sour cream. “Then I not keep you. Thees is important work, for you and Mama. Not for hens to laugh at.”
    I laugh. Russian idioms never translate particularly well. “Yes, Papa. Very serious work.”
    He kisses my forehead and smacks my ample bottom. “Go. Make pelmeni. I do leaves.”
    He turns away in his voluminous sweater, wrists exposed and somehow dear, picks up the discarded rake from the ground, and returns to meticulously and laboriously making piles of fall foliage. I know my dad; he will not come in for dinner until every leaf is gone from the yard; he is passionate and proud about keeping his home immaculate. We moved in here when I was a baby, and he and Mom paid it off by the time I was in high school. It might be small, but it’s in perfect condition, everything kept in good working order by Dad, and impeccably clean by Mom.
    I open the door, and call out. “Mama! It’s Alana.”
    My mom’s head pops around the corner from the kitchen. She is wearing her usual pale blue cotton kerchief over her gray curls, which are as unruly as my brown ones. Over her housedress she is wearing a crazy hand-painted WURLD’S BEST GRANDMMA apron that Sasha’s boys made her for her birthday last year. It leaves a little sprinkling of silver glitterbehind her when she walks, like she is the Wurld’s Oldest Strippur, but she loves it and wears it religiously. Whenever I bring Dumpling over it takes me a week to get the sparkle out of his paws.
    I head for the kitchen and kiss her cheek, wordlessly handing off the package of ground meat as she reaches out for it, like a delicious drug drop.
    She squeezes the package, and sniffs it appreciatively. “Pelmeni or cevapcici?” she asks seriously—dumplings or Serbian sausages—one recipe from her Russian paternal grandmother, one from her Romanian maternal grandmother.
    “Pelmeni, please.”
    “Goot. Come. Tea first, then cook.” My mother turns to the stove and puts a flame under a kettle. She reaches above her head for two thick glasses from the cupboard. She takes the jar of syrupy sour-cherry jam from the counter, and puts a healthy dose into one glass, knowing how I love the old traditional tea sweetened with the preserves. I get much of my economy of motion in the kitchen from her, every gesture practiced and simple. Coasters and squat, heavy glasses from the bottom shelf of the middle cabinet. Tea leaves from the old tin delivered in a fat pinch into the battered white china teapot, painted in an intricate netting of cobalt blue, its gold accents chipping off. She catches the water just as it starts to steam, but before it hits a full boil, tells me, “Boil makes bitter,” for the gazillionth time in my life. She brings glasses and spoons to the oilcloth-covered table, along with the teapot. I stir the thick, purple-black jam until my tea is clouded and little pieces of cherry float and spin. My mother takes a dense sugar cube from the bowl on the kitchen table, and places it delicately between her teeth, sucking the hot tea into her mouth through the cube, a sweetening method I have neverbeen able to master without eating about seven sugar cubes per cup of tea.
    We don’t talk while we drink our tea, but my mom reaches over and pets my hand while we drink. I love this about her. She always gives you room to breathe and be, without needing noise all the time. I think after the barely controlled chaos of my siblings and me growing up in that house, she, like me, loves the quiet. She knows we will talk while we cook, but for now we can just drink tea