When dad died, he had left it in his will that he should be cremated, and the ashes scattered wherever was most convenient. The backyard was probably what he had in mind. Or possibly the trash can at the crematorium. Whatever we did, a funeral was out of the question. Mom couldn’t bring herself to just dispose of dad, though, so we bought him a casket and rented him a plot at the cemetery at St. Andrews, near the spot where his own dad was buried. It was a beautiful ceremony. Dad would have hated it.

There were a thousand stories surrounding this skillet. The family favorite—not mine, but the family’s—was that the skillet had cooked Marie Antoinette’s last meal, a plate of savory crepes, when she was held away from the mob at the Tuileries. I always thought that story smacked of a tall tale. How would this skillet have escaped the mob in Lazar’s possession or his son’s or grandson’s after the revolution? And anyway, who the hell was Marie Antoinette that she should eat crepes while the people around her made due off root vegetables?

A little less than a fortnight after the birth of John Baskerville, a printer famous for inventing many different typefaces. Like my father, he was an atheist.

The skillet was an ancient thing, thin looking and dented all over from years of use. If you glanced at it in a junk shop, this skillet, you’d take it for junk destined for the melting pits. But its weight in your hands had presence, the way a stone left by a glacier has presence on a landscape. The skillet was handed down from man to man on my father’s side for ten generations, and possibly more. It had been hammered out of a single chunk of copper that one of our relatives had dug from the ground and purified in his own smelting pot. The date hammered onto the underside of the pot read 12 February, 1706, and next to it, faded almost to the point of illegibility was his name, Lazar. You could just make it out by tracing your finger along the bottom. Since then, the skillet had passed from hand to hand in our family.

Pale and covered with skin like tissue paper. He said they were always cold. Everything was just so cold. I got him a glass of warm water to drink, hoping some of that warmth would spread inside of him. I don’t know if it did any good, but he fell asleep before I left, and I told the night nurse that he was complaining of the cold. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

Every day, he stayed home and watched television and did small repairs around the house. He fixed the porch, which had sagged since before we moved in; probably, it was the reason we got the house for cheap. The place was a fixer-upper, and dad spent the weeks he wasn’t employed taking care of all the minor problems he could. He also cooked dinner every night, since mom was exhausted when she came home from work. Dad was a much better cook than mom, and I remember this was the first time I ever really appreciated food. It was also the happiest I can remember seeing my dad, ever.

Mom and dad bickered for days when he bought the knives on QVC. It wasn’t so much that they were a needless purchase—although they were, since we already had a set of knives that served us just fine—but that dad had up and bought them without asking mom. He was between jobs at the time, and had been for several weeks. Mom was the sole bread winner, and she’d come home exhausted from extra shifts at the hospital. When he bought the knives, it was her money he had spent, and she let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d better damn well ask her the next time he decided to stick his fingers in her pockets. All the same, they were really good knives.