Best Food Writing 2014 by Holly Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

surgery, he still bought cartons and hid them. Although he never returned to smoking, he couldn’t stand the thought of being denied possession. And so Dezy stocks her pantry and fridge with Dr. Pepper while her two kids have to come to my mother’s house to find chicken or juice.
    My mother raised the issue with her once. Only once.
    Two months before the surgery, during the incipient stages of Dezy’s growing discomfort, her mother said to her, “my house isn’t a restaurant.” This had been after a day of babysitting both my niece and nephew. “The kids told me they don’t have any food at your house.” Dezy, her face flushed as it had been the past week or so, sat at the table and gasped for air with one hand pinching the side of her stomach. At the time, she did not know that there was anything wrong with her. What she blamed on a cramp from a long day stocking shelves at Team Disney, a store that sold sports-themed apparel for the Dizzy Donalds, the Maestro Mickeys, and the Goaltending Goofys, was actually golfball-sized gallstones that blocked her bile ducts and threatened to rupture her gallbladder. What she blamed on a long day’s work in one of Orlando’s happiest kitsch shops was actually an activation of pancreatic enzymes that inflamed the area around her intestines and caused intra-abdominal hypertension.
    She took in a deep breath and felt a razor-sharp string tighten around her gut.
    â€œI already look after them all day while you’re at work,” my mother continued, as oblivious to Dezy’s discomfort as was Dezy. “Can’t you, I don’t know, pack their lunches? I have to go shopping now in order to make dinner.”
    My mother collected my nephew’s homework and stuffed it inhis backpack. Then she picked up my niece’s clothes, festooned on the back of the couch. Without once looking at Dezy—my mother always felt a shameful guilt after scolding one of her children—she walked to the patio door, opened it, and called her grandkids out of the pool.
    After they dried themselves and came inside, Dezy, who hadn’t moved from the dining room chair, yelled at them for “playing the victim.”
    â€œFrom now on you wait until you get home to eat,” she said.
    â€œI like Nanny’s food,” my niece said.
    Dezy stood up and the small patches of pink that had lingered in the fleshiest part of her cheeks vanished. She turned hospital-white all over. She grabbed an arm from each child and stormed out of the house.
    Later on that night my mother called me and expressed her concern for my sister. “She’s been getting mad so easily,” she said.
    â€œNext time you should ground her.”
    I didn’t think anything was seriously wrong with my sister. It had always seemed to me that she lived a life without consequence. She dropped out of college to work for Disney because that’s “always been my dream.” Despite making less as a guest services representative than the hungover high school student in charge of the emergency break button on Space Mountain, she and her husband managed to buy a townhouse close to my parents’ house. She went on to have two children and then bought a pedigree beagle, all on an hourly salary and periodical help from my mother. It had always seemed as long as she did what she wanted, life would never catch up.
    I called my sister once before the surgery. Because I had just recently jumped on the organic bandwagon that swept the nation like yellow Livestrong wristbands, I suggested that she change her diet instead of having the procedure. I recommended she read articles proclaiming the benefits of a diet sans processed foods. I also tried echoing some of T. Colin Campbell’s arguments that chronic illnesses can be linked to our eating habits. She firmly responded that she would not live her life in fear, as if she were giving in by not having surgery.