As for the roux, our dad explained, the first morning after he lost his job, melting that first quarter-pound stick of butter the way the French did when preparing their sauces, he could not turn his back on the pan for a minute—and so that afternoon when we got off the bus to find him still whisking the roux in the kitchen, none of us were that surprised because when Dad committed to something, he meant it. Here is how he made the roux:
1. Melting huge sticks of butter to sludge in the pan.
2. Sifting the flour in.
3. Whisking it fiercely.
4. Repeating this process, but often enough that the flour and butter mixture never thickened past a liquid so Dad could use it later on to sauté the seafood and veggies and spices.
Dad was still in his pajamas, purple with the mascot of his alma mater on them. The tendons in his arms were corded; his wrist muscles bunched with the back-and-forth motion. The roux was thick and chocolate colored, a beautiful roux by any standard, and Dad had been building it up for so long that it nearly sloshed over the top of the pan. Nothing else of the gumbo to come was in sight: No peppers or onions. No okra or corn.
He could never stop whisking, we knew from the past, until the roux was rich and done. He literally could not step away from the pan. “I literally cannot step away,” he would say and had said in the past and said now in the kitchen as we stood in the door with our backpacks and gym bags, waiting for him to come hug us or greet us—to lift our bags from us and fix us a snack. If he did step away, then the flour would congeal and the roux would turn into a doughy, charred mess and he’d be forced to scrape it out and clean the pan and start again.
After he lost his job, Dad was back home again. That meant he was always cooking.
Dad had us prepare our own dinner that night—for ourselves and for Mom, who’d be home any minute. Salmon (though we’d never cooked it before), the cook-by date a day away. And when Mom did get home from work to the sight of us trying to preheat the broiler, Dad stirring the roux in the stainless-steel pan with the delicate bloom of the gas flame beneath it, she went to the island where Dad hadn’t left and whispered in his ear a moment. We couldn’t hear the words she said. She said them and waited, then said them again. And when Dad had absorbed them or seemed to absorb them, his face through the waver of steam never changing, our mother knelt down and she gathered us to her, telling us that there wouldn’t be gumbo that night, maybe not even tomorrow night or the night after. The gumbo Dad was making now might never even pass our lips; it had never been “for us” so much as “for him,” which we were meant to understand. But none of us did; none of us looked at Mom. All of us were watching Dad.
For signs of surrender or humor—some shift. But nothing in him changed at all.
He had the face of someone whisking.
Whisking, whisking through the night, long after his family were all in their beds. We knew Dad was whisking because we could hear it: the gurgling scrape of the whisk in the pan, the occasional tick of the gas flame restarting.
We woke up to the smell of fat. Dad was still with the roux when we entered the kitchen. All that sat out was the flour and the butter, the whisk and the pan. One bag of flour empty, another half-finished; husks of greasy butter paper. When we entered the kitchen, Dad’s eyes brightened at us, though Dad himself appeared not great. His cheeks were cadaverous, his hair butter-coiled. He smelled like the line at the DMV office. He was already shouting to dig in the cabinets for the “big pasta pot” and to “hand it up pronto” so that he could transfer the roux from the pan. When it poured in the pot without spilling a drop, we heard Dad exhale like he did watching sports. And then he called out from the stove the steps for making toaster waffles.
But Dad never told us to take off the plastic. A few seconds into the toasting, it smoked, giving off a noxious taint. Then the toaster caught on fire. There was so much smoke—black. It rushed up in this funnel. We were scared and we backed away from the toaster as one, looking panicked at each other, and when nobody spoke, looking only at Dad, who stood at the island still whisking the roux, a paralyzed anguish at large in his eyes. Though he’d said he literally could not step away, we saw he was trying to step away, now—that his body was telling him, Step away, do it! Your home and your children will die if you don’t! But his mind, or whatever his mind had become, seemed to be telling him: You can do both. So he stretched endlessly in his purple pajamas for the cabinet doors beneath the sink, which still had a child lock securing them closed so that the youngest among us would come to no harm from the cleaning supplies hunkered under the pipes, and with his whisking arm still whisking (his left arm, we’d started to notice more often, the arm that Dad favored in most everything), he ratcheted the child lock open, flipped open the cabinet doors, and reached in half-blind for the thing that he sought, cursing and twisting and fumbling around as the smoke from the fire made us tear up and cough. He slid us the fire extinguisher, pin up, clattering over the tiles, toward the toaster.
“My sweethearts,” he said, when we’d put out the fire. “So proud of you, my little champs.”
We say back home again because not long ago Dad had been our sole caretaker. He’d accepted the leave he’d been granted from work for a month after each of our births in succession to care for us after our mother returned to work but before we went into some manner of daycare. Though we barely remembered the growls that he made as he chased us around with his terrible arms, or the prickle of his belly-blows as he nuzzled us into the living room couch, when he did return home after losing his job for what we assumed would be longer this time, it wasn’t without a half-glimpsed recognition on all of our parts that we’d done this before.
The roux, too, was familiar to us.
We’d seen him discard other imperfect roux if they didn’t taste right or chunked up in the pan. To Dad, every meal was like something alive you could kill with impatience or just being sloppy. But this roux, too, was somehow different; it was more than a roux, after all, to our Dad.
It was almost like one of us. Dad couldn’t leave it—even after Dad left us to fend for ourselves.
That evening, when Mom got home, she attempted a different approach from last night. Instead of approaching her husband directly and whispering tenderly into his ear, she went to the refrigerator and began to remove everything for the gumbo. One by one she placed these items surrounding the burners, where Dad could get at them.
She put out the okra. She put out the corn. She put out the celery, carrots, and onions. She even put out the frozen shrimp to thaw in a mesh colander in the sink. Moving over the counters, our mother gave pause at the foul, blackened niche where there wasn’t a toaster and where the flames had spread, as well, to singe the bottoms of the cabinets, none of which we’d been able to do much about in spite of Dad’s forceful instructions to clean. This time she looked like she’d say something for certain, something everyone there was intended to hear, but her nostrils twitched spastically, flattened with stench. She went around opening all the windows.
With his eyes never leaving the 40-quart pot, Dad tracked her with a quiet panic; his head tracked Mom, now here, now there, like some creature, blood-hungry and blind, in a cave. The cook pot was filled with a velvety roux the likes of which we’d never seen, more shiny and rich for there being more of it—though all of us knew there was too much already. When Mom began to run the sink, Dad’s purple pants darkened.
Mom flew from the room.
She avoided the kitchen the rest of that night. Making sure that we did too, she even took us out for pizza. There were checked tablecloths and a run at the Claw. No one ever mentioned Dad. When later that night we returned to the house and had to enter through the kitchen (there was no other way to get into the house, which so far hadn’t been an issue), walking across the shadowed tile with pizza boxes held before us, Dad was there at the island, still stirring the roux. He seemed to lean toward us as we moved toward him. He wanted that pizza; he smelled it like breathing. As we walked past the back of his sagging pajamas, where a third smell, not pizza and not the roux cooking, wafted up into our noses, Mom reached up and side-slapped the back of Dad’s head. Not playful and cheery, but sorrowful, violent. The force of the slap jerked his head toward the pot. We wished we could see what the front of him looked like. When we were almost in the hall, for some reason still bearing the leftover pizza, Mom snuck back into the kitchen. Slapped Dad on the back of the head two more times.
Where else would Dad be when we woke in the morning but at the island where we’d left him? We already knew how to make toaster waffles—except there wasn’t any toaster. And so we put them out to thaw to eat them later, sad and damp. The puddle at his feet had dried but the smell was still there, hovering in the grout. Our dad had lost weight since beginning the roux, and when our dad lost weight—our dad—you always saw it in his face, which was now a gray cheese from the grease in the pot, with bruised-looking pockets surrounding his eyes. Strangely, though, his whisking arm appeared three times its normal size, as though it had grown from the nonstop activity or as though the rest of his body had shrunk around the whisking arm itself.
A week passed then. Or seemed to pass.
Maybe it was several weeks.
The roux graduated from Dad’s pasta pot to the one he used for crawfish boils, a 120-quart monster of steel that came with a specialized colander insert. This pot was for a propane burner set up on a cook stand in someone’s backyard, not for a gas range in the kitchen, but since Dad literally could not step away, two stovetop burners were needed to heat it. The whisk was too short for the depths of the roux. Dad now used a long wooden spoon for the stirring, like a warlock hunched over inscrutable broth. Mom no longer whispered to him, or bothered shouting at him either, as she’d done every night for the first several nights as soon as we were tucked in bed, but when she got home turned completely to us—our needs and our tempers, our comforts. Our dinners. As singularly fixed on us as Dad was on his endless roux. She made sure that we’d done our homework. She made us dinner, something simple, though we weren’t allowed to step foot in the kitchen unless it was to wash our hands, and even then Mom stood there, braced, in front of the spot that our dad couldn’t leave. Sometimes, though, we hid and watched as she worked around Dad at the heart of the kitchen. There wasn’t that much room in there. Mom would brush past Dad somehow and it felt like the contact ignited a fuse. She slapped his head, hard, with the side of her hand like she had done on pizza night, or kicked him sharply in the shins, or once even pulled down his pants in a stroke so Dad had to claw them up two-fingered, grunting. Summertime and she turned up the heat in the house. Put on jazz flute recordings, which Mom knew he hated. Went around to the side of the house with a wrench where she cut off the gas and came back in the house, going straight to the kitchen where Dad stood immobile, the roux congealing underneath him, and that was the moment she gathered us to her, like she had on his first night of making the roux, longer ago now than we could remember. She actually beckoned us into the kitchen and grouped us around her, Madonna and children, kneeling as one behind Dad, at the stove.
Did we kneel on the tile because Mom told us to? Or did we for another reason? And did all of us know as we lowered our heads that here was our final, unshakable prayer for Dad, our dad, to come back to us? For Dad, our dad, to make a choice between us and the roux that would be never be done?
His face was turned in profile to us. Even so, we saw a glimmer. Not the glimmer of love, as we’d hoped we would see, but the glimmer of painful, spontaneous death if the roux lay there fallow for one moment more.
As soon as Mom saw it, the wrench in her hand, she went back around to the side of the house. A minute later at the stove the burner flame concussed to life.
We had dinner in front of the TV that night. Watched whatever we wanted, ice cream for dessert. Mom herded us up to get ready for bed. Made sure we washed and brushed our teeth. Read us a story and tucked us in bed.
There could be nothing strange about this. In the past, she had done it a million times. And yet for the moment there was something strange; it should’ve been different.
It should’ve been Dad.
Back in the days when our dad had cared for us, content and alone with us here in the house, he’d done it by instinct: an edge to our cries would let him know when we were hungry; a look of pleading in our eyes would let him know when he should hold us. But that instinct had left him. He’d lost it, forgotten. What remained was misguided and monstrous.
A figment.
Soon he could no longer stand without the support of the island before him. He’d figured a way to still stir with his left arm while his right one supported the weight of his body, three-fourths of him staggering into the counter, curled around the stovetop burners. The arm that still stirred was a thing to behold. Still hale, though the rest of his body had withered, and still able to work the spoon with artful, unrepentant speed. Someone—not us—must’ve fed him. Still, Dad never asked for food. In fact, the only thing he’d asked during these last several weeks of concocting the roux was for us to stop at the store after school to buy him more butter and flour for the pot, an errand our mom had forbidden us to do. And yet somehow the roux still grew with phantom flour, phantom butter. Sighing and bubbling, crinkling and smoothing, in some process of growth whose foundations escaped us. The gumbo ingredients Mom had set out had long since turned black in the air of the kitchen, the see-through plastic slick with rot. It was as though while Dad’s life dwindled, the life of the roux became ever more full. One of them must shrink and shrink until it flinched first or was nothing at all.
And we thought when Dad’s fingernails slid in the pot that we’d begin to understand, because nothing so awful as this could go on; it was only a matter of time before Dad turned around at the stove and said, SORRY, JUST KIDDING! HAD YOU FOR A MOMENT THERE! And when his hair began to shed in greasy clumps and fall in, too, we sensed the truth was coming for us like the beckoning scent of a warm, home-cooked meal—how he’d nourished us simply by being our father, how everything else was a flash in the pan. But did we really understand? Or understand any more now, looking back? What more was there to understand than the swirling, dark depths of the roux in its pot?
But that wasn’t the worst part, believe it or not. The worst part hadn’t even happened. No, the worst part would come when Dad stood at the island, barely upright, barely there with bowls of gumbo set before him, and like any proud cook would await the verdict on the meal he had made us with such loving care. 
Adrian Van Young is the author of two books of fiction: the story collection The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press) and the novel Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media). His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, Slate, VICE, BOMB, The Believer, and The New Yorker, among others. His third book, Midnight Self, a story collection, will be released by Black Lawrence Press in October 2023. He lives in New Orleans with his family.
Illustration: Calum Heath
