With each Sunday morning always came a familiar scent. The smell emanated directly from the kitchen, and sometimes when you entered, the air was veiled with a thin layer of mist because we’d forgotten to open the windows while we cooked. Every Sunday morning was accompanied by a pancake breakfast, complimented by a serving of scrambled eggs, bacon, and orange juice. This, in turn, would be accompanied by jazz music, often Vince Guaraldi. My daughter called it pancake music.
By the time we finished cooking and had sat down at the table, my goodness the setting was picture perfect; myself, my wife, and our daughter, Lilly, sitting there with our plates. Though our daughter soon grew to be a teenager—preoccupied with friends, boys, and sports—she never missed a Sunday morning pancake breakfast. Not once did she omit.
But this truth eventually came to pass. Nowadays, Lilly was absent each and every Sunday morning, but not out of choice. We always told her not to text and drive. Almost once a week, we stressed it, both myself and my wife. Lilly swore she drove like a ‘grandma’, both hands on the wheel, looking both ways, all of that.
Many nights I lay awake, wondering if we just weren’t clear enough. Perhaps we should have stressed it every day and not just every week. I would have stressed it every hour if it had made Lilly listen. Because if she wasn’t texting while behind the wheel on that one fateful Sunday afternoon, perhaps she’d still be here with us.
I remember the coroner—I think it was the coroner—asking if we wanted to see her. I told him no. I was certain that the image of her mangled figure would be the one that was burnt into my brain for the rest of my days. And I didn’t want that. I preferred the image from a few hours previous: a glistening pair of eyes that looked down happily on a plate of pancakes.
Seven days later marked the first time we omitted our pancake breakfast. I was sure this trend would remain, and I was correct. We couldn’t bring ourselves to it. Neither I nor my wife even suggested, even hinted at continuing our tradition. It was an unspoken sort of thing. We just knew, naturally, that it wouldn’t be the same, and that if we even tried, at least one of us was liable to break into tears.
However, one Sunday morning many months later, something changed. It must have been before 6 AM that I floated into a state of half sleep, half lucidity. My eyelids were practically bolted shut, but conscious thoughts were slowly emanating from my brain, nonsensical at first. And then, a familiar fragrance seemingly drifted into my nostrils, a fragrance that I had not smelled for a long time. It was not just a pancake smell, though it was partially. It was what I could best describe as a fully-fledged ‘Sunday morning smell’; pancakes, eggs, bacon, and coffee, all swirled together and packaged into one.
My eyelids suddenly snapped open, and just like that, the aroma had left. All I could smell, now, was the house’s typical scent. I did not know how or why I had smelled that Sunday breakfast smell, I figured it had just been a thing of dreams. But this thought suddenly morphed into a sort of command, directed at me. And I soon found myself walking down the stairs, entering the kitchen, and grabbing the pancake mix out of the cupboards.
I fired up the stove and began furiously mixing up all of the ingredients—for pancakes, for scrambled eggs, for bacon—as if I were possessed. My thoughts had no rhyme or reason to them, but I just kept at it, mixing up the batter, flipping the pancakes, cracking the eggs, frying the bacon.
Soon, I found myself with a full-on Sunday morning breakfast in front of me. It was more than usual, too. There was enough food here to feed five households. The box of pancake mix, the carton of eggs, the package of bacon…all were completely empty. Not only was there so much food, but the quality matched the quantity. Everything I had cooked appeared as if it had been cooked by some master chef. It didn’t make sense, but there was my achievement, right before my eyes.
All of the food was spread out across the kitchen counter. I sat at the table across from it, marveling at my achievement. Whatever had possessed me to cook all of this food had apparently left me, as I now just stared at it as if it were the work of something outside of myself.
I was about to stand up and go fetch my wife, but something caught my eye. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, at first, it was sort of like that little glob we all see in our eye, but can never look right at it. But as I blinked and darted my eyeballs this way and that, I was able to observe what had caught my attention. Standing there, in the doorway that gave way to the kitchen, was Lilly.
My heart nearly leapt to my throat. I rubbed my eyes more times than I care to recall. It was her. She walked into the kitchen and came to a halt in front of the counter, looking down on the Sunday morning breakfast I had made. And then, she smiled, at peace. I stood up and approached her. I stood across from her, on the opposite side of the counter.
“Lilly?” I stammered. She smiled and nodded her head. She then looked back down at the breakfast I had made.
“Thank you,” she said.
I reached for the immense stack of pancakes, grabbing one off the top.
“Take one,” I said as I attempted to hand it to her. But as I let the pancake down onto the palm of her hand, it drifted right through and fell to the floor. I looked at her, expecting to see her upset. But she only smiled and shook her head.
“It’s not for me,” she said. “It’s for you.”
And with that, she disappeared. For a moment, I was saddened by her sudden departure. But I soon realized what she meant and I went upstairs to get my wife. My wife and I ate our traditional breakfast that Sunday morning and the one after and the one after that. It was what Lilly wanted.