On (pot)luck

I am alone tonight. The potluck has been rescheduled, due to prior engagements and the Oscars and a missing tooth and a Vicodin hangover.

I cook anyway, amid the chaos. The house is an absurd, comical mess, as it always is by Sunday after my on-week with the girls. Cobwebs, dog fur, rugs askew, bills pondering mass suicide at the edge of the dining room table, a sink full of slimy pots and plates and crusting oatmeal and sour milk. I try not to judge myself by my housekeeping, but still I wonder, What will my daughters remember of this time?

Because my phantom tooth hurts, because the house is too large when the girls have just left, I am making chicken soup—Karmen’s recipe. The recipe has hung on my refrigerator for several years, written in Karmen’s hand, the ingredients drawn in her colorful voice. Her way. I don’t have all the ingredients, but Karmen taught me that soup, like love, can bear improvisation.

I dig the wishbone out of the chicken carcass (Ingredient No. 10) with a little shudder. I realize I have never liked the wishbone nor what it represents. Who enjoys this game? I’ve never wanted to take part in a competition that involves the snapping of a bone (desecration on top of desecration on the way to soup), a competition in which the loser must forfeit luck.

I know how hard luck is to come by. I have no interest in swiping it from another, her loss being my gain. I’ll find my luck elsewhere, thank you. Go on. You take it.