Free Fook by Brian Drinkwater Page B

countless occasions
being awakened to the same situation by his wife’s kitchen follies.
It had been three years since her passing and since then his
daughter had made it her mission to fill in for her departed
mother, right down to her tragic inability to cook.
    “Sorry Daddy,” Katie timidly lowered her
head as her father reentered the room.
    “That’s ok sweetie. I appreciate the
sentiment. So, what were we having, bacon?” he questioned as
he made his way back to the stove, turning on the hood vent. The
blackened remains of the pan vaguely resembled bacon but he
couldn’t be sure.
    “Eggs,” Katie replied.
    Looking at the pan again he couldn’t figure
out how his daughter had messed up eggs so badly. The charred
remains weren’t white or yellow but pure black and compressed into
three relatively neat rows that he would have sworn were strips of
bacon if it weren’t for the uncooked entrails of egg whites puddled
on the stove top beside the burner.
    “The bacon’s in the oven,” his daughter
quietly added.
    He knew what to expect as he opened the
oven, but for some reason he kept his face directly in front of the
door as he pulled it open and a thick cloud of smoke billowed from
the inferno within.
    “Son of a…!” Phil yelped as the smoke struck
his eyes, instantly drawing tears. Quickly he pulled his face away
from the continuing plume, waiting for the burning sensation to
subside. He was aware, however; that with every second the door
remained open, the smoke detector was preparing for its next
rant.
    Quickly he closed the oven and spun the knob
to off, only briefly catching a glimpse at the cause of the fire
within it. Apparently, his daughter had chosen to line the baking
sheet with wax paper instead of aluminum foil and to make matters
worse, she’d chosen the cookie sheet without raised edges to trap
the abundance of grease. A river of flammable fluid poured from the
edge of the pan to the hot surface below as the paper glowed a
bright orange, ninety percent of its surface already consumed by
white hot flames.
    “We’ll just let that burn itself out,” he
coyly remarked as he wiped at his still burning eyes.
    “I’m sorry Daddy,” Katie apologized as she
hurried to the sink, grabbing a paper towel from the dispenser and
running it under the faucet before handing it to her father.
    Still caught off guard by the near inferno
that was his home, he didn’t notice the warmth of the wet cloth
until he applied it to his face. His daughter wasn’t the brightest
of girls. At age five she’d attempted to plant a nickel in the
garden out back, claiming that a money tree would soon grow and
help the family pay for her mother’s expensive treatments. Of
course at the time he and his wife had found the claim adorable and
thought nothing of it. They had even bought a small tree and
planted it overnight in the exact spot where the nickel had been
buried. The next morning they’d been awoken by young Katie jumping
up and down on their bed, shouting at the top of her lungs, “It
growed! It growed!”. She’d led them down to the garden, barely
giving them time to put on their shoes before dragging them outside
to show them her tiny tree with dollar bills taped to its branches.
Now the tree was ten feet tall and on occasion he would still tape
a few dollars to the lower branches for her to find, though at
times he wondered if she understood the joke or really did believe
that money grew on trees.
    Her questionable intelligence aside, he
loved his daughter more than anything. She was the spitting image
of her mother with the same long, blonde hair and hazel eyes;
everything right down to the tiny dimple on the right side of her
mouth whenever she smiled. And even though she’d managed to end up
six months pregnant at the young age of sixteen, he couldn’t be
mad. In his opinion she was perfect and the tiny grandchild in her
womb was a blessing.
    “I’m so sorry Daddy,” she wet another paper
towel