Free When in Doubt, Add Butter by Beth Harbison

child’s safety, she pulled him roughly off the stool and said, “Go to your room. You know you’re not allowed to play with knives.”
    Instantly, I felt horrible. “Please don’t be mad at him—it’s not his fault! I told him he could help me, so he probably thought it was okay to do what I said since I’m an adult.”
    She sniffed at me. Sniffed! As if it were debatable whether or not I was, in fact, an adult. “You’re the cook. You are not authorized to tell him to do anything.”
    “No, of course not, I wasn’t giving him orders. I just thought it might be nice for him to have a little bit of distraction while you and Peter … talked.”
    “Mr. Van Houghten and I—”
    Mr. Van Houghten . She’d said it pointedly. Big Me, Little You. It was one of her favorite passive-aggressive tricks.
    “—don’t need you running interference for us. We’re perfectly capable of having a discussion and taking care of our child, thank you very much.”
    There was so much I wanted to say to her. But even if I had the freedom to let fly with everything, without regard to losing my job, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
    Besides which, I couldn’t let fly without regard to my job. She was not only in charge of my Monday-night paycheck, but she held the purse strings for my country club job as well. I had already lost Fridays, so I really couldn’t afford to lose another night.
    “Of course, I was just trying to help. I thought he’d have fun helping out.”
    “It wouldn’t have been very fun if he’d poked his eye out with that knife, would it?”
    “It was a butter knife, and I was right here,” I pointed out. I had to. “He really couldn’t have gotten hurt.”
    She tilted her head at me like the old RCA Victor dog and narrowed her eyes. “Is that right?”
    I tried to give a little laugh, but it was hard to do in the face of her steely resolve. “Well, I’ve had my share of knife injuries, believe me, but none of them ever came from a butter knife.”
    She assessed me, judging. Then just shook her head and left the kitchen, passing Peter on his way back in.
    “ You deal with her,” she snapped. “I have a splitting headache.”
    If she had a headache, it was bound to be from malnutrition more than from me, her exhausting cook.
    Peter ignored her and fastened his gaze on me, concerned. “What happened?”
    “I let Stephen measure an ingredient out and gave him a butter knife to level the measure.” I grimaced with the retelling, hoping it wouldn’t seem so heinous a crime to him as it did to her. “I’m really sorry.”
    “A butter knife?” He laughed and reached for the knife on the counter. “This one?”
    “Yes.”
    “Does it actually say Fisher-Price on it?” He turned the knife over, pretending to look for the toy branding, then set it down. “That couldn’t have hurt him.”
    “Honestly, that’s what I thought,” I said. It was a relief that he wasn’t mad. “But Angela came in, and I guess she was scared when she saw it in his hand, so she spoke”— shrieked —“and it made him jump and drop the knife. Which, admittedly, isn’t something you ever want happening around a child.”
    Peter waved the notion away. “Don’t worry about it. I think it’s nice that you were letting him do something in here. She won’t even let him come through here without hovering over him to make sure he doesn’t eat something unhealthy. Not that you could find anything unhealthy in here. Or edible.”
    I smiled. “Well, she does have a lot of food allergies and whatnot.” Onions, dairy, honey, cinnamon, peanuts, carrots, mushrooms, and any kind of root vegetable, to name a few. “That kind of limits what you can keep in the kitchen.”
    He gave a half shrug. “I don’t know that she has allergies so much as there are things she doesn’t like the idea of.”
    “They’re really not allergies?” He’d said it earlier, but I thought he’d been kidding. I’d been driving