Jannie shrugs. I can tell she’s not going to be much help. Enthusiastic? Not so much.
I try to get her excited. “Listen, it’s cool. It’s different. The whole deal—orange juice, toast. You know, breakfast for supper.”
“They did that a lot in elementary school,” Jannie says. “They used to have that ‘breakfast for lunch.’ I always thought it was kinda boring.”
“I always thought it was kinda fun,” I say. I get a shrug and a reluctant nod from my sister.
I tell her to start peeling the potatoes, and I’ll start cracking the eggs into a bowl for the scramble. Actually, I’ve just checked out a very cool egg-cracking hack on my phone. You hold the egg in one hand, snap it against the rim of the bowl, and you hook your index finger inside of the shell and the egg should drop into the bowl. Like I said, that’s whatshouldhappen. How does this hack work for me? Of course, it’s a small disaster, egg yolk dripping all over the kitchen counter, egg white soaking my hand, bowl mostly empty.
Jannie gets the potatoes and takes a small paring knife from a drawer.
“You should use the potato peeler,” I say.
“Nana always uses this little knife,” she says.
“Yeah, but Nana is a pro,” I say.
Then, in about two seconds, as if on cue, Jannie says, “Damn this knife.” I look at her. A dot of blood has appeared on her left thumb. Her loud “Damn this knife” brings Nana into the kitchen immediately.
“What’s with the cursing going on in here?”
(Nana should spend two minutes in the hallway of my middle school if she wants to hear whatrealcursing sounds like.)
“Why are you using that silly little knife, Jannie, when we’ve got an actual potato peeler?” Nana asks.
“Well, you always use…” Jannie begins.
Nana says, “Yeah, but I know what I’m doing.” Then she adds, “You’re lucky you escaped with such a teeny-tiny cut.”
Okay, I was definitely worried when Jannie nicked herself, but after hearing Nana call her injury “teeny-tiny,” I get the slight urge to tell her,I told you so.
“Let me wash my hands, and I’ll peel those things for you,” Nana says. A minute later she is peeling the potatoes so quickly that it looks like she’s on fast-forward. But this is only the beginning of the circus that’s coming into town.
Bree and Dad heard Jannie cry out from her cut, so they join us in the kitchen now. Bree immediately notices the scrap of paper towel wrapped around the tip of Jannie’s thumb. The first thing my dad notices is the mess of egg guts sliding down the outside of my mixing bowl onto the counter.
“You don’t crack an egg on the rim of the bowl,” he says, and he decides to give me a demonstration. He lifts an egg from the carton and proceeds.
“You crack it on the countertop. That way the shell won’t shatter and…”
But as he demonstrates his preferred egg-cracking method, he doesn’t move fast enough between counter and bowl. Splat and spread!
“Nice, Dad,” I say. “If the surface was hot enough, we could fry the egg right there.”
My father laughs. He can’t help it.
“Okay, camera’s rolling. Take two,” he says.
My dad creates the exact same mess again, and this time around Bree decides to comment.
“No, Alex.Inthe bowl.Inthe bowl.” But she’s laughing.
“I understand the concept, Bree,” he says.
Direct from the potato-peeling department, Nana Mama says, “Are you sure you do?”
More laughter.
While the egg shenanigans are happening, I turn on the burner and unwrap the bacon. It looks like some new kind of bacon that Nana’s bought. It’s a stack of round slices—“rashers,” Nana calls them. So I slice each one of the roundish pieces into strips, making them look the way bacon should look. Then I lay the slices out in Nana’s amazingly heavy, amazingly hot cast-iron fry pan.