get me up earlier. You’re the parent. Help me out.”
He could do that. “You’re a grump in the morning.”
“You can take it.”
She had a point.
“You spend too much time alone.”
“I’m dancing again. Be happy with that for now.”
“It’s not my happiness I’m worried about,” he said. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve heard you laugh out loud, Kels? Or since I’ve heard a note of excitement in your voice?”
He could talk to her about an imbalance of neurotransmitters that could lead to serious depression if not counterbalanced.
“Then give me something to get excited about.” Her quiet words, spoken to her tablet, stopped his thought process cold.
Rather than arguing with him, or giving him the rote “whatever,” she’d actually given him a positive opening. In two years’ time, it was a first.
Expecting a request for a smartphone, a trip to Disneyland or a week off school, he said, “I’m not talking about a momentary fix, Kelsey. You know that.” Though he was tempted to give her any of those things, all of them, to reward the open, non-defensive approach. “Maybe you need to try the medication...”
If Lil, Kelsey’s mom, had been able to take something for her paranoia, would she still be alive? Not that the paranoia had been the actual cause of death. No, the onset of labor at the beginning of the third trimester had done that.
“Dad, you promised me...”
A promise he might have made a mistake in making. Lil had, by example, made her daughter petrified of “drugging herself up.” She’d been almost fanatical about medication—to the point of toughing it out through headaches so she didn’t have to take an over-the-counter painkiller. She’d had Kelsey on the same pain management regime.
It had taken Burke getting really angry, raising-his-voice angry, before Kelsey had taken the antibiotics she’d needed for strep throat the previous year.
The girl seemed to think putting drugs in her body was disloyal to her mother. But there was so much she didn’t know. Some things Burke hoped to God she never knew.
Still, antidepressant medication was not going to be as easy a win.
Maybe because he didn’t want to medicate her, long term, either. Not unless she truly needed the help.
“It’s been two years since Mom died.”
“So give me something to get excited about.”
There it was again. That opening.
In all of the advice he’d received over the past two years, most of it well-meaning, and some of it professionally sought, no one had told him that raising a thirteen-year-old was going to make him dizzy. He’d never have believed, even a year before, that his sweet, rational, logical-beyond-her-years little girl was going to morph into a confusing mass of humanity that he could no more predict than the weather.
“What, Kels? What can I give you that you’d be excited about?” Knowing as he asked the question that he’d walk through fire to get it for her. As long as he didn’t think it would do more long-term harm than good.
She grabbed her tablet. Swiped and tapped so fast he didn’t know how she could possibly even read what she was choosing. She stopped. Seemed to be skimming the page. And turned the tablet around to him.
“This,” she said. “I wanted to enter but I can’t because I’m just a kid, and besides, you’re the master chef left among us.”
Lil had been a certified chef. Official ranking. In addition to teaching, she’d put in the hours necessary in professional food service. Because her dream was to open her own catering business. She’d talked him into taking classes, too, while he’d still been in med school. As something they could do to spend a little stress-free time together. And to his surprise, cooking had been right up his alley. Engaging him scientifically and yet offering him a relaxation he’d been unable to find elsewhere.
“I’m not a master chef,” he told her. He’d obtained a culinary art certification. That was all.
He looked at her tablet.
Made a cursory visual pass. Then read every word in the headline.
She was handing him the tablet, so he took it. Heart sinking.
She wanted him to be on a reality cooking show. As in, television. Like he could just pick up a phone and volunteer.
Like he had a chance in...any chance at all of making it on the show.
“It’s that one filmed here.” Kelsey was up on her knees, beside him now. He swore he could still smell that sweet baby-powder scent that had entered their home with her thirteen years before. “In Palm Desert. Family Secrets. Remember, they had that Thanksgiving special where they chose the first one of this year’s contestants...”
He remembered.
He’d wanted to go to Disneyland over the holiday. Thanksgiving—a food day by all counts—was one of the hardest without Lil. Kelsey wasn’t bouncing back from her mother’s death at all. If anything, with the onset of puberty, her moroseness was getting worse. He’d thought to distract her by heading to the coast for the holiday.
Instead she’d been adamant, to the point of tears, which always suckered him, that they cook dinner together, with all the trappings, and spend the day watching cooking shows. To honor Lil.
“So now it’s open auditions for the other seven contestants. It’s right here in town, Dad. You want me to be excited about something? Audition for this show.” She’d scooted closer, was resting her chin on his shoulder as she looked at the tablet with him.
“You have to use your own family recipes,” she said as he sat there, feeling more lost, more alone, than ever before. “It’s the recipes that are the real competition,” she went on, her voice gaining an energy that seemed to encompass their entire world.
“There’s an audition, and then four weeks of competition between eight candidates. Then whoever wins at least one of the four competitions goes to the final round. Each week you’re given a category and you have to make your family recipe with a secret ingredient. It says here that the candidates have to appear for one day of extraneous taping, too, before the competition starts.”
She was setting him up to let her down. He could see it so clearly even if she couldn’t. There was no way he was good enough to compete against real chefs.
“You can use Mom’s recipes, Dad! It’s a way for her to get what she wanted—to have her cooking recognized and appreciated. It’s a way to keep her alive. Like make her immortal or something. You have to do this...”
It was best to be honest with her. To face the tough stuff head-on. He’d been told. And he also just knew...
“I can’t.”
She slouched
