My hands shook as I signed the incorporation papers for Food Truck Insight. The pen felt heavier than it should—not from the legal weight of the document, but from the absence that made this moment possible. Three months earlier, my sister Tammy had looked up from her hospital bed during a chemo session and said with that familiar teasing glint, ‘So when are you finally going to do something reckless?’ Her voice, hoarse from treatment but still unmistakably hers, carried the same challenge it had when we were kids debating mayonnaise preferences or the merits of roller coasters. Now here I was, launching the business she’d never see, naming it after her rescue dog Ginger—the golden retriever who’d licked tears from both our faces during those impossible last weeks.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. For years, Tammy had been the adventurer—the one who cycled from DC to Pittsburgh, crewed tall ships, and dragged me zip-lining through Costa Rican rainforests. I was the cautious younger brother who pretended to hate pizza just to differentiate myself. Yet in the end, it was her illness that taught me how fragile our borrowed time really is. That lesson now simmered in the stainless steel kitchen of my fledgling food truck, where the first menu item would be the ‘Big Bacon Classic’—a nod to the Wendy’s burger that exposed my childhood mayonnaise lie.
Grief has a way of rearranging priorities. Before cancer rewrote our family’s story, I’d spent years hesitating over career shifts and creative projects. Tammy’s diagnosis compressed time like some terrible gravitational force, making trivial concerns evaporate. During her final hospitalization, we’d play a game where she’d describe hypothetical food truck concepts between morphine doses. ‘Make sure there’s snow cone syrup for the chemo kids,’ she’d insisted after her nurses raved about the machine she’d brought to treatments. That purple-highlighted wig of hers would bob as she lectured me about sustainable packaging, her fingers tracing the IV line like it was just another sailing rope to manage.
Now the truck’s logo—a stylized cello crossed with a hockey stick—captured the essence of who she’d been: the musician who performed at Carnegie Hall, the big sister who wrestled a subway thief for my street hockey stick, the woman who faced terminal illness with more grace than I’d ever managed in traffic. Somewhere between inventory spreadsheets and health department permits, I realized this venture wasn’t just about serving meals. It was about continuing conversations she’d started, honoring the way she turned even chemotherapy into an act of community with those ridiculous snow cones.
On the truck’s inaugural test run, I burned the first batch of fries. The smoke alarm wailed like an off-key cello, and for a dizzying second I could hear Tammy’s laugh—the one that used to erupt when our childhood Christmas ornament projects went horribly wrong. Her voice seemed to linger in the sizzle of the grill: ‘You always learn the hard way, don’t you?’ I flipped the burgers with renewed determination, thinking of how she’d cycled 250 miles despite struggling to ride a bike until fifth grade. Some lessons take a lifetime to absorb.
Childhood: Tammy’s Laws
The first law of Tammy was simple: whatever she liked, I must pretend to hate. This unspoken sibling code governed our early years with surprising consistency. At age six, I declared mayonnaise disgusting because Tammy spread it thick on her sandwiches. For three years I suffered through dry turkey subs, secretly longing for that creamy tang, until I discovered Wendy’s Big Bacon Classic came pre-slathered with the forbidden condiment. My culinary rebellion began with that first illicit bite behind the bike racks.
Our food wars took stranger turns. When Tammy developed a pizza obsession in fourth grade, I staged dramatic gagging sessions at the mere mention of pepperoni. This performance lasted exactly one Thursday night – the scent of molten cheese proved stronger than my resolve. Yet the mayonnaise charade held firm, becoming such ingrained family lore that our mother still reflexively removes jars from my sight during holiday meals.
Bicycles became our second battleground. Watching Tammy tumble repeatedly while learning to ride, five-year-old me concluded two-wheeled travel belonged in the same category as dragon taming – theoretically possible, but clearly not for mortals like us. When she finally mastered it in fifth grade (an eternity in child years), I approached my training wheels with the grim determination of a soldier charging into no-man’s land. To everyone’s shock, especially mine, I was circling the block unassisted within the afternoon. Tammy’s face in that moment – equal parts pride and exasperation – foreshadowed her future 250-mile bike tour from DC to Pittsburgh. She taught me that difficulty isn’t permanent, just inconvenient.
Our musical collaborations followed a different rhythm. The Christmas we attempted crafting a dog sled ornament from popsicle sticks and actual dog hair remains legendary in family shame circles. The final product resembled a hairy spider caught in a glue trap, but the all-night whispers and stifled laughter bonded us more than any perfect decoration could. Contrast this with our symphonic triumphs – Tammy on cello, me on trombone – where we actually produced recognizable melodies. Music became our neutral territory, the one arena where we didn’t need to differentiate through opposition.
Looking back, these childhood dynamics formed the bedrock of our relationship. The food feuds taught me about authentic preferences versus performative identity. The bicycle saga demonstrated that struggle precedes mastery. And the musical mishaps versus successes showed that some things require serious effort, while others just need joyful participation. Tammy’s laws weren’t really about opposition – they were a big sister’s roundabout way of helping me find my own voice.
What surprises me now isn’t how fiercely we defined ourselves against each other, but how those early conflicts seamlessly transformed into complementary strengths. The girl who “broke in” our parents for me became the woman who invested in my first restaurant. The sibling rivalry that once had me pretending to hate perfectly good food evolved into a friendship where we could relish our differences. Even in her final months, when chemo made eating painful, Tammy would grin through the discomfort as I smuggled contraband fried chicken (bone-in, always bone-in) into her treatment sessions. Some laws, it turns out, are made to be savored rather than followed.
The Call That Changed Everything
The phone rang on an unremarkable Tuesday evening. I remember the way the November light slanted through my kitchen window, casting long shadows across the half-empty coffee mug. Tammy’s name flashed on the screen – my big sister who never called without texting first. That should have been the first clue.
Her voice sounded oddly calm when she said, “I found a lump.” Three simple words that made the room tilt sideways. She delivered the news like she was telling me about a new hiking trail she’d discovered, not the seismic shift that had just occurred in both our lives. I gripped the edge of the counter, my knuckles turning white, while she explained how she’d noticed it in the shower that morning – fast-growing, hard as a peach pit beneath her skin.
In that moment, I became two people. The outwardly calm brother who said all the right things (“We’ll get through this together”), and the internal wreck already calculating survival statistics. While Tammy talked about scheduling a biopsy, my free hand was already pulling up breast cancer survival rates on my laptop. Stage IV. Metastasis. Five-year survival. The terms blurred together as I tried to reconcile the numbers with the vibrant woman still chatting casually about her dog Ginger’s latest antics.
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad yet,” she said before hanging up. “No point worrying them until we know for sure.” Typical Tammy – always protecting everyone else, even when she was the one who might be in danger.
For the next six weeks, we existed in this strange limbo between knowing and not-knowing. Tammy went about her life at REI, walking dogs, planning trips she might never take. I became an expert at the kind of compartmentalization that lets you laugh at dinner while your brain screams about lymph node involvement statistics. We developed a coded language – “lump updates” disguised as work complaints, biopsy results discussed like weather forecasts.
When the official diagnosis came in January – invasive ductal carcinoma, grade 3, already in her lymph nodes – it landed with the surreal thud of something we’d known was coming but still couldn’t quite believe. The oncologist used phrases like “treatable” and “manageable,” but I saw how Tammy’s fingers trembled when she signed the consent forms. That tiny betrayal of her usual stoicism scared me more than any medical jargon.
My parents reacted exactly as I’d predicted. Dad launched into stories about coworkers who’d “beaten” cancer decades ago. Mom started researching alkaline diets and essential oils. Their refusal to acknowledge the severity mirrored my own frantic Googling sessions – all variations on the same desperate theme: This can’t be happening to Tammy.
There’s a particular cruelty to watching someone you love grasp at hope while you’re drowning in statistics. I’d lie awake at night, phone glowing in the dark, scrolling through metastudy after metastudy. The numbers became my secret burden – 22% survival rate at five years for stage IV. 63% chance of bone metastasis. I memorized them like some macabre multiplication table, but never shared them with Tammy. She had enough to carry without my midnight research spirals.
Our roles reversed in those early days. The little brother who’d once needed her to bandage burned arms now sat beside her at appointments, taking notes when the medical terms came too fast. The sister who’d taught me to ride a bike now needed me to explain the difference between a mastectomy and lumpectomy. We developed new rituals – Tuesday night chemo prep calls, Sunday afternoon “no cancer talk” walks with Ginger.
What surprised me most was how ordinary life continued around us. The world didn’t stop turning because Tammy had cancer. People still cut us off in traffic. Baristas still messed up our coffee orders. The mundane cruelty of it all sometimes took my breath away – how could everyone just keep living when my sister might be dying?
Yet in quieter moments, I began noticing unexpected gifts. The way strangers offered their seats in waiting rooms. How Tammy’s REI coworkers organized a meal train without being asked. The depth of conversations we’d never made time for before. Cancer became the lens that magnified everything – the petty frustrations seemed smaller, the moments of connection brighter.
Looking back, those early months after diagnosis were like watching someone you love stand at the ocean’s edge as the tide pulls out. You see the water receding, know what it means, but can’t stop the inevitable wave from coming. All you can do is stand beside them, hand in hand, and face what comes together.
The Snow Cone Machine in the Chemo Room
Tammy’s chemo sessions became something of a legend at the oncology center. Not because of the brutal side effects – though those were very real – but because of the impromptu snow cone stand she operated from her treatment chair. She’d arrived one Tuesday with two rented machines, a rainbow of syrup bottles, and a sign that read “Brain Freeze for a Cause.”
The nurses told me later they’d never seen anything like it. Most patients barely had the energy to hold a book, let alone churn shaved ice for strangers. But Tammy had discovered that many chemo patients craved ice chips to counteract mouth sores, and her solution was characteristically extravagant. “If we’re going to be miserable,” she’d said while unpacking the machines, “we might as well have purple tongues together.”
Portia, the nickname she’d given her chest port, became the unofficial mascot of these gatherings. We’d joke about running unauthorized experiments – what if we funneled coffee through the IV line? Could we install a tiny disco ball inside the catheter? The oncology nurses, saints that they were, played along with our gallows humor while changing her dressings.
During one particularly long infusion day, I watched Tammy explain the “red devil” drug’s nickname to a newly diagnosed teenager. “It’s called that because it turns your pee scarlet,” she said matter-of-factly, then handed the girl a neon blue snow cone. “Pro tip: the brighter your snow cone color, the less you’ll notice.” The girl’s mother mouthed “thank you” as her daughter took her first real bite of food in days.
What nobody said aloud was how the snow cone syrup bottles lasted longer than Tammy’s original treatment plan. When the first chemo cocktail failed, we switched to oral medications she could take at home. The machines went back to the rental company, but Portia stayed – a stainless steel reminder that we were now playing a different game entirely.
One afternoon, after helping Tammy shower around the port’s bulky dressing, I caught one of the nurses in the hallway. “Does she really not know?” I asked quietly. The nurse adjusted her scrubs and chose her words carefully: “I think she knows exactly what’s happening. She’s just choosing what to do with that knowledge.”
Later, I’d find Tammy researching natural burial preserves between episodes of baking competition shows. The snow cone days were over, but the impulse remained – if life was going to be bitter, she’d keep finding ways to make it sweet.
The Final Staircase
Carrying Tammy up those seventeen steps was the hardest physical act of my life. Not because she was heavy—by then the cancer had whittled her down to ninety-eight pounds—but because every groan she made as I adjusted my grip sounded like a betrayal. Her bedroom was upstairs, and she wanted to be there with the desperation of a sailor spotting land. ‘Just two more,’ I’d lie, when we’d only ascended one. The staircase smelled of lemon disinfectant and the metallic tang of the handrail I clung to for balance.
Earlier that morning, she’d been lucid enough to discuss radiation treatment options with her oncologist. Now, halfway up the stairs, she suddenly asked me about our childhood dog Miller. ‘Remember when he…’ Her sentence dissolved into nonsense syllables as her head lolled against my shoulder. A warm dampness spread across my arm where she’d lost control of her bladder. The weight of her felt different now—not just the absence of muscle tone, but the way her body seemed already halfway to some other existence.
At the top, we paused in the bathroom to clean up. I used the lavender-scented wipes she kept for Ginger, the dog now whining at our feet. ‘Oh Tim,’ Tammy murmured as I helped change her clothes, her clarity returning in flashes like a failing lightbulb, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ The irony twisted in my chest—she wouldn’t have to wonder much longer. Ginger pressed her wet nose against Tammy’s dangling hand, leaving glistening trails on the skin that looked almost like the tear tracks Tammy could no longer produce.
Legal Limbo
The lawyer arrived at 3:17 PM with documents spread across Tammy’s quilt—will, healthcare proxy, power of attorney. He had the patient demeanor of someone accustomed to deathbed signings. ‘Tammy, do you understand you’re appointing your brother as executor?’ She stared at the pen in her mother’s hand as if it were a foreign artifact. ‘Grilled cheese,’ she announced brightly. My mother’s hopeful expression shattered like dropped china.
For three hours we tried. The power of attorney got signed when Tammy mistook the line for part of a crossword puzzle she’d been working on weeks earlier. The will remained incomplete when she began reciting her birthday—’April 2, 1976’—in response to every question, including ‘What year did you graduate college?’ The lawyer finally packed up, casting me an apologetic glance that said more about prognosis than any scan ever had.
That evening, the death rattle began. The hospice nurse had warned us about this sound—air passing over relaxed vocal cords—but nothing prepares you for the reality. Each wet, crackling breath seemed to echo through the house like a morbid metronome. Ginger crawled onto the bed and rested her head on Tammy’s chest, her own breathing synchronizing with the terrible rhythm. When a drop of canine moisture fell onto Tammy’s hospital gown, I couldn’t tell if it was drool or tears.
Threshold
At 5:42 AM, the crashing sound brought me running. Tammy lay sprawled at the base of the stairs, her forehead grazed by the doorknob on her way down. ‘Why’s my lip bleeding?’ she asked, her pupils different sizes. In that moment, I understood we’d crossed some invisible boundary—no more treatments, no more paperwork, just this primal vigil. The morning light through the stained glass window she’d installed cast colored shapes across her body, making her look already memorialized.
When the hospice nurse returned, he spoke the quiet truth we’d all been avoiding: ‘This is active dying.’ The phrase stuck in my mind—as if death could be passive, something that just happened to you while you binge-watched sitcoms. Tammy had never been passive about anything. Even now, her fingers plucked at the blanket in a rhythm that matched the Bach suites we played continuously from her Spotify account.
That night, I lay beside her tracing the scars on her scalp from where the tumors had pushed outward. The room smelled of lavender essential oil and the sour tang of sickness no amount of cleaning could erase. Somewhere around 2 AM, she suddenly squeezed my hand with surprising strength. ‘The sled dogs,’ she whispered clearly. For one glorious moment, I thought she was recalling our childhood Christmas ornament disaster. Then she added, ‘They’re waiting in the snow,’ and I understood she was seeing something beyond my reach.
When the blood came at noon—bright red against her pale lips—Ginger let out a howl that raised the hair on my arms. Tammy took three more ragged breaths, then none at all. The silence was so absolute I could hear the neighbor’s wind chimes two houses away. Ginger licked Tammy’s still-warm cheek before crawling under the bed, where no amount of coaxing could bring her out.
Later, washing my sister’s face for the last time, I noticed the faintest smile lines around her mouth. Even cancer hadn’t erased them. Somewhere, Tammy was probably laughing at the cosmic joke of it all—the girl who once cycled 250 miles now unable to climb a single stair. As I closed her eyes, a breeze stirred the wind chime outside her window, playing a discordant melody that sounded almost like a farewell.
The Funeral She Planned
The woman from Prout Funeral Home sounded genuinely surprised when she mentioned knowing Tammy. “We worked together at REI before I joined my family’s business,” she explained. That’s when I realized my sister had orchestrated her own funeral from beyond – through a friend none of us had met, at a green burial site none of us knew existed until three days after her death.
Natural burial grounds were scarce in New Jersey when I began searching. Most cemeteries still required concrete vaults and formaldehyde embalming, practices Tammy would have hated. The first result on my frantic Google search led to Vail Memorial Cemetery, where a small wooded section had recently been consecrated for green burials. Only one person rested there before Tammy. The caretaker later told me the land was being preserved this way to prevent commercial development – a detail that would have made my environmentally-conscious sister punch the air in triumph.
Arrangements unfolded with eerie precision. The REI-turned-funeral director handled paperwork with compassionate efficiency, remembering how Tammy once mentioned preferring “to become tree food” over traditional burial. We chose a handwoven seagrass casket that decomposed naturally, just like the body it held. No toxic chemicals, no metal hardware – only biodegradable materials returning to the earth. Even the cemetery’s active beehive felt like Tammy’s mischievous touch, as if she’d whispered to the pollinators, “Make sure they notice I’m here.
Over four hundred people came to the woods that day. Musicians from Tammy’s symphony played Bach’s Cello Suites near the grave. The restaurant across the highway catered with her favorite foods, including buttered noodles (soap-free, this time). During the service, a swarm of bees drifted over the gathering – not threateningly, but with purposeful curiosity. Someone joked that Tammy was checking attendance.
Later, the caretaker mentioned attending the same small liberal arts college we did. In a state of nine million people, the odds seemed absurd until I remembered Tammy’s knack for connection. She’d maintained friendships from every life chapter, and now those threads wove together in her final act. College friends drove hours to stand beneath oaks she’d never seen, while childhood pals and REI colleagues swapped stories about her fearless spirit.
Only afterward did the full meaning emerge. The funeral wasn’t just a memorial – it was Tammy’s last lesson in how to live. The natural burial reflected her environmental values. The community gathering mirrored her belief in bringing people together. Even the bees carried her trademark blend of whimsy and purpose. She’d left nothing to chance, right down to the friend who made sure her wishes were honored.
Ginger, Tammy’s once-traumatized rescue dog, visited the grave often in those first months. She’d sniff the wildflowers growing on the plot, then lie quietly beside it. Watching her, I finally understood what green burial meant. Tammy wasn’t gone – she was becoming part of the living world she loved. The trees would absorb her molecules through their roots, the bees would carry pollen enriched by her essence. In death as in life, she remained woven into the ecosystem of relationships and places she’d nurtured.
Sometimes now, when I pass a thriving oak or hear cello music in an unexpected place, I smile. Tammy’s fingerprints are everywhere – especially in the choices she made about how to say goodbye. She taught me that funerals aren’t just for the dead; they’re final instructions for the living about what truly matters.
The Rebellious Survivor
Three months after Tammy’s funeral, I found myself standing in a dimly-lit tobacco shop, staring at a wall of cigars. The earthy scent of aged tobacco leaves filled the air, triggering an unexpected memory – Tammy dramatically waving her hand in front of her nose when we passed smokers outside her favorite Manhattan jazz club. “That smell is worse than my hiking socks after the Appalachian Trail,” she’d declare every single time, without fail. Yet here I was, deliberately selecting the most pungent cigar in the shop.
When the clerk asked if I needed help, I surprised us both by answering: “My sister hated these. I’ll take two.” The words hung in the air like the smoke I was about to inhale. This wasn’t about tobacco – it was about rebellion against the unbearable neatness of grief. How could the world keep turning so normally when mine had tilted irreparably?
The Contradictions of Grief
The first puff made me cough violently, tears springing to my eyes that had nothing to do with the smoke. It tasted awful, exactly as Tammy had always claimed. Yet there was something perversely comforting in doing something she would have disapproved of – a tangible way to feel connected through opposition. Later that week, I visited a tanning salon, another act of defiance against her staunch environmentalism. Lying in the UV glow, I imagined her exasperated sigh: “You know melanoma runs in our family, right?”
These small acts of rebellion became secret conversations with her memory. Where others might visit gravesites, I found myself engaging in what a grief counselor later called “counter-memorial behavior” – actions that paradoxically honor the deceased by violating their values. The more Tammy would have hated something, the more powerfully it made me feel her presence. Our childhood dynamic of playful opposition had found its final, bittersweet expression.
The Legacy That Remains
Yet for every rebellious act, there were a dozen moments where I unconsciously channeled Tammy’s spirit. I caught myself:
- Refusing plastic utensils at food trucks, hearing her lecture about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
- Automatically checking ingredient lists for palm oil, remembering her rants about deforestation
- Donating to the ASPCA every month, seeing Ginger’s grateful eyes in every shelter dog’s face
Her environmental convictions had seeped into my bones more effectively than any lecture. The real rebellion, I realized, wasn’t in rejecting her values but in continuing them without her physical presence. At my food truck’s launch, we used compostable containers and donated leftovers to shelters – a tribute she’d have appreciated far more than any cigar.
Dreams in the Kitchen
The most startling moments came at night. One recurring dream featured Tammy waiting in line at my food truck, dressed in her signature REI hiking pants and worn-out Tevas. She’d always order the same thing: “Buttered noodles – hold the soap this time.” We’d laugh about the childhood spaghetti incident until the dream dissolved. Other nights, I’d hear her cello playing from some unseen corner of the kitchen, the notes guiding me through new recipes.
These visions felt more real than memory, as if grief had sanded down the barrier between worlds. A neuroscientist might call it “bereavement hallucination,” but to me, it simply confirmed what I’d suspected since arranging her natural burial – that energy never disappears, it just changes form. Tammy was gone, yet somehow more present than ever in the scent of pine needles, the taste of burnt toast (she never could master the toaster), and the stubborn persistence of love that outlasts even death.
Living the Questions
A year after her passing, I’ve made peace with the contradictions. Some days I light a cigar and blow smoke rings toward the sky, imagining Tammy rolling her eyes from whatever cosmic campsite she’s occupying. Other days I volunteer at animal shelters or lobby for green burial legislation in her honor. The pendulum swing between rebellion and reverence no longer troubles me – it’s become its own strange language of remembrance.
Perhaps this is what survival looks like: not moving on, but moving forward with the full weight of absence and presence intertwined. Tammy’s death didn’t teach me that life is short – she’d shown me that through how she lived. It taught me that love is long, stretching beyond the visible spectrum of existence in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
As the food truck’s fryer sizzles and customers laugh under our strung-up lights, I sometimes catch myself glancing at the end of the line, half-expecting to see a familiar figure in hiking boots. She’s never there in body, but always present in the music playing from our speakers (Bach’s cello suites, of course), in the rescued pit bull napping by the condiment station, and in the determined way I now approach life – with the hard-won knowledge that every ordinary moment is extraordinary because it’s happening at all.
The bell above the food truck door jingled as the first customer of the day stepped inside. A girl no older than twelve peered at the menu board, then pointed to the handwritten special: ‘Ginger’s Spiced Apple Cider – $4.’
‘Why’s it called Ginger?’ she asked, swinging her legs against the counter stool.
I wiped my hands on my apron, catching a glimpse of the polaroid taped beside the cash register – Tammy grinning atop a sled pulled by reindeer, her cheeks flushed against the Arctic snow. ‘That’s a long story,’ I said, pouring cider into a mason jar. ‘About the bravest woman I ever knew.’
The steam rising from the drink carried the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg, the same spices Tammy used in her infamous ‘snowstorm hot chocolate’ during our childhood winters. As the girl sipped, her eyes wandered to the collage behind me – photos of Tammy cycling across bridges, playing cello at Carnegie Hall, feeding scoops of rainbow snow cones to nurses during chemo.
‘Was she your wife?’ the girl asked.
‘My sister.’ The word still caught in my throat sometimes, sixteen months later. ‘She taught me that adventure isn’t about how far you go, but how much you bring to the people around you.’
Outside, the October sun warmed the truck’s green paint – the exact shade of Tammy’s favorite REI fleece. Every detail carried her fingerprint: the compostable utensils she’d have insisted on, the playlist alternating between Bach cello suites and 90s pop hits, even the stupidly oversized soup ladle we’d once used to stage a milk carton heist.
The girl’s mother called from the picnic tables. As she slid off the stool, a maple leaf sticker on her backpack caught my eye – identical to the one Tammy had pressed into my palm during our last coherent conversation. ‘When you miss me,’ she’d whispered, ‘look for me in the ridiculous places.’
At closing time, I flipped the OPEN sign and leaned against the counter. Through the service window, the sunset painted the food truck park in golds and pinks that would have made Tammy grab her camera. Somewhere beyond the treeline, a flock of geese called as they migrated south – the same route she’d cycled years ago on her DC-to-Pittsburgh trip.
I touched the polaroid of her Arctic adventure. The truck’s name wasn’t just about honoring Ginger the rescue dog; it was about the gingerroot Tammy swore cured everything from seasickness to heartbreak. About the ginger-haired sailor who taught her to tie bowline knots on that tall ship in San Diego. About all the small, spicy truths that make a life unforgettable.
As I locked up, a breeze sent a handful of crimson leaves dancing across the asphalt. One landed at my feet, its edges curled like Tammy’s signature smirk. I pocketed it, already planning tomorrow’s special – butternut squash soup with a hint of ginger, served with a side of stories about the woman who taught me that endings are just new flavors waiting to be tasted.
