Ve said adamantly to me as she danced across the kitchen, shimmying and swaying. She was gathering ingredients to bake cookies. No doubt about it. In times of stress and strife, the women in my family took to baked goods like warriors to a battlefield. I tended to head straight to the Gingerbread Shack for my weapons of choice, but Aunt Ve liked to make her own sweet munitions. I’d taken a quick hot shower and rummaged through the lone box of clothes that remained upstairs in my room to find something to wear. It had been slim pickings: a pair of old sweatpants and a T-shirt I used when I oil painted. My wet hair was pulled back into a long braid, and I sat barefoot at the kitchen peninsula with a crocheted blanket tossed over my shoulders. Annie was warming my lap and kept looking at me with her big amber eyes as though wondering why I smelled so odd. The scent of oil paint and thinner tended to cling to fabrics, even after washing.
