Sunday, mid-November. Four in the afternoon. The kitchen in the father's house is warm because the oven has been on for an hour for the bread and the window over the sink is bright with the particular late-autumn tilt of Colorado light, gold, the kind that tips in from the southwest and finds the tiles on the far wall. Your mother is at the counter with the dough. Charlotte is on the stool across from her with flour on one cheek. You are beside your mother with the bowl of filling — ground pork, onion, salt, nothing fancy, what Oksana used to do.
The flour is Gold Medal from a five-pound bag half-empty by the spice shelf. The mixing bowl is the mother's from Albany — the big blue one with a chip you have known since you were small. The dish towel over Charlotte's shoulder is a red-check store-bought, not hers, probably the father's buy-a-dozen-at-a-time from the Colorado Boulevard hardware store. Three objects, three histories. Charlotte does not know the histories. You do.
Your mother hands Charlotte a ball of dough from the mound.
Your mother's hands on the dough are the hands of someone who has done this for forty years. She does not look when she shapes the round. Her thumb-and-forefinger make the circle without her attention. She is humming something you think is a song and then you think is not a song, just a breath-rhythm of hers when she works. Then you catch one line. So close, no matter how far. Andriy's. Your mother does not know she is humming him. Charlotte watches. Charlotte has her own ball and her own small wooden rolling pin. Her circle is oval and thick. She laughs at it. Your mother says good without looking. Charlotte tries again. Her second circle is thicker at one edge than the other. She presses with her whole palm.
Your mother — still without looking — reaches over and turns Charlotte's pin the right way. Charlotte says oh. Your mother says better, and Charlotte says better, and keeps going. Your own hands are between the two skill-levels: the circle comes round if you concentrate, it goes oval if you let your attention drift. Your filling-bowl is warm from having sat by the stove. The stove ticks once, gas ticking in a burner you had not realized was on.
Your mother presses the edge of a pierogi with her thumbnail. She does it in a specific way — the nail catches the flour-line, the angle tilts outward, the thumbnail bites and releases. Your body knows this motion. Your grandmother pressed pierogi at a counter in upstate New York in 2010 when you were seven and you sat next to her on a taller stool than Charlotte's. Your mother's thumb is the grandmother's thumb. She inherited the angle. You inherited the way you hold your coffee cup. You do not say it.
Your mother says to Charlotte, I always leave one corner unpinched. My mother said that way they come out honest.
Charlotte looks at the pierogi between her palms. Charlotte looks at her own corner, which is not quite pinched — the eight-year-old technique has not yet separated pinching from smoothing. Your mother lifts Charlotte's pierogi, tilts it, and lets Charlotte see the open corner. Like that. Charlotte says oh. Charlotte says I did it by accident. Your mother says the best ones are.
Your own hands go still for a second.
I count them in the kitchen without meaning to. Oksana at mother's age. Mother at my age. Charlotte is eight. The work is the work.
You count the filled pierogi on the tray. Twelve. Twenty. Twenty-eight by the time Charlotte has filled her sixth and your mother many more. Charlotte says, how many pierogi is that?
Your mother says, a village.
Charlotte considers. How many people were there in the village?
You do not look at the pierogi. You do not look at your mother. You look at Charlotte, who has flour on her cheek and flour on her right elbow where she leaned on the counter.
You say, A village is a number.
Charlotte keeps her hand on her pierogi. She looks at you for a second. She goes back to her work. She pinches the next edge slowly, as if pinching might now mean something other than pinching.
Your mother does not say anything. Your mother's hands do not pause. But her left hand — the one not working the pierogi — moves flat onto the counter for the space of a breath, and then returns to the dough.
The work continues. The first tray fills. Your mother moves to the stove. On the counter to the left of the cutting-board there is a Cherry Creek King Soopers receipt folded into quarters from Friday's shop — Karen did the run Friday afternoon — with the top line — one gallon of whole milk, two eighty-nine — visible at the fold. You register it without registering it. Your mother does not need the receipt; the work is already the work. Your mother stretches once, briefly, her back arching against the counter — the stretch of a woman who has stood at counters for forty years and who does not think about standing at them anymore. She resumes.
Charlotte, still at the counter, decides she wants to make a very small pierogi and also a very large pierogi. She does. Her tiny pierogi is the size of a marble; her enormous pierogi is the size of her own palm. She names them. This one's Bubu. This one's — this one's — The President.
Your mother asks what The President means.
Charlotte says, It's big.
Your mother says, OK.
Your mother moves back to the counter. The Colorado light has tilted farther — the window now carries a band of gold across the tiles on the far wall that was not there when you started. The clock in the other room — the one your father has had since before you were born — strikes the hour with its specific wooden note.
The pot comes to a boil. Your mother lowers the first tray's pierogi in with a slotted spoon, one at a time. Seven. Eight. Ten. Charlotte stands on her stool to watch. She says, they sink. You say, they come back up when they're done. Charlotte waits. The first one bobs. Charlotte says, there. Charlotte says, it came back. Your mother says, that means it's ready. Charlotte says, how do they know? Your mother says, the water tells them.
She does not look at you when she says it. You do not look at her.
You carry the cooked pierogi from the pot to the serving plate with the slotted spoon. The plate is the plate the mother brought with her from Albany. The plate is green at the edge. The pierogi go on in a ring.