37
I am telling the story between bites of burger. “It’s a heart,” I show my audience, using the burger-free hand, “this size.”
Small. A dime bag?
Maybe. And perfectly shaped, light pink in color, threaded in white. Veins? This confuses me. Are they veins or fat? Maybe it’s fat. I don’t tell this part, I’m thinking it.
And as I think it, I’m remembering the meat I saw as a child, the mysterious tree-like branches that grew from my pot roast.
“What’s that,” I would ask, as I freed the rubbery threads from the roast. Arteries?
“It’s just part of the meat,” Mom said.
“Just eat it,” Dad growled.
My audience chews, goes for a fry. Dips it.
I wouldn’t eat the pot roast, even freed of the offending parts.
And yet, I stood there next to Mom in our burnt umber kitchen as she removed the heart from the baggie and dropped it into the water. I waited.
“Was it cooked?” my audience asks.
“No,” I say. “She had to cook it. It was raw.”
I take another bite of burger. A hamburger. For 25 years I wouldn’t eat these. Damn.
So good.
The water was already boiling. I stood there waiting for the heart to come out of the bath.
What happened to the rest of the chicken? In my memory there is only this: A perfect pink heart.
Mom handed it to me.
Mom liked liver and onions. No one else did. Sometimes I could smell it when I walked into the kitchen after school. It smelled like, well, nothing I would ever want to eat.
Mom handed me the heart. She probably said, “Careful, it’s hot.”
“You ate the heart?”
“Yes, I ate the heart.”