I had started that lasagna at seven o’clock that morning.
My mother’s recipe is not quick. You make the sauce first, from scratch, with San Marzano tomatoes and a whole head of garlic and a bay leaf, and you let it simmer for two hours while the house fills up with the smell of it. Then you make the ricotta filling with fresh parsley and an egg and a lot of pecorino. Then you layer it. Carefully. Noodle, sauce, filling, mozzarella. Again. Again.
My mother made that lasagna every Christmas Eve of my childhood. In a tiny kitchen in Scranton, with the radio playing Bing Crosby, and her apron dusted with flour.
When Todd was little, he used to stand on a chair next to me and help with the layers.
“More cheese, Mom,” he’d say. “More cheese.”
He’d sneak bits of mozzarella when he thought I wasn’t looking. I always saw. I never said anything.
That morning, standing in my kitchen at seven o’clock with the sauce bubbling, I’d thought about that little boy on the chair. I’d smiled. I’d put extra cheese in the top layer just for him.
Now the lasagna sat in the passenger seat of my Camry.
I buckled the seat belt around it. Out of habit, I suppose.
For the first mile of the drive home, I kept both hands very still on the steering wheel. Ten and two. The way my father taught me.
For the second mile, I told myself, out loud, “You are not going to cry. You are not going to cry in this car.”
By the third mile, I was crying anyway.
By the time I pulled into my own driveway, I had stopped. I sat in the dark for a minute with the engine off. My neighbor Marjorie’s Christmas lights were blinking along her fence. Red, green, white. Red, green, white.
I made a decision.
The lasagna was going straight into the freezer. And I was not going to think about any of this until morning.
I carried it inside. I put it in the freezer, foil and all. I took off my red coat and hung it in the closet.
Then I sat down at my kitchen table.
I didn’t sleep that night.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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