Tyler lifted his hands in surrender. “Okay! I’m washing the rice!”
We set the ingredients over a medium heat to cook. “Keep stirring, and let me know when it thickens up,” I said.
“Let me guess. I’ll know when it’s done?”
“It takes about fifteen minutes, but yeah,” I said and bumped him out of the way with my hip. “Here, let me.”
“Fine by me.” He handed over the wooden spoon.
I settled into the unhurried rhythm of slowly stirring the rice, swirling the spoon in long, lazy drags as the contents simmered and the familiar scent wafted up, stirring up memories—some of them from childhood when I’d first been deemed worthy by my lola of holding the spoon and some of them more recent. When Sam was undergoing chemo, there had been times she hadn’t been able to keep any food down, but biko had always worked for her. Some weeks it felt as though she’d been living on nothing else. I missed making biko for her, but she hadn’t wanted to touch it in a while. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to avoid the association with chemo.
I still couldn’t quite believe that she was on the road to recovery. A tiny, scared part of me worried that any day now she’d come home complaining of tiredness or headaches and it would turn out the doctors had missed something—which was bullshit, because Sam was getting healthier with every passing week. It was hard to break the habit of worrying about her, was all.
I swept the spoon through the biko and inhaled the rich scent of coconut and sugar, watching the bubbles on the surface pop as the mixture simmered.
“Smells good,” Tyler said from where he was prepping the quiches for the lunch rush.
“Yeah. Takes me back to when I was a kid and we visited family,” I said, smiling at the memory. I dragged the spoon through the pan again and tapped the side. “This is almost ready.”
He loaded his tray into the oven and came over, sniffing the air. “What do we do now?”
I handed him the spoon. “Okay, pour it into the baking tray. Then it goes in the oven for thirty minutes. You want to cook it at about three seventy-five, so I’d put it on a higher shelf. Then,when it’s done, we let it cool in the tray. Then we cut it up and serve it with a spoonful of latik on top of each piece.”
“You’ve been holding out on me,” Tyler said. “This really is easy as shit.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Because we get to buy everything from the grocery store. My lola says that she can rememberherlola making it, back in the Philippines, and she’d use coconuts out of the backyard.” I turned and noticed Chase leaning in the doorway. “Hey.”
“Hey,” he said. He lifted his chin. “What are you guys making?”
“Biko,” I said. “It’ll be ready in about thirty minutes.”
He came closer. “Is that one of the ones you told me about?”
Tyler glanced at me and raised his eyebrows.
I pretended my flush was from the ovens. “Yeah. It’s like a sweet rice cake. Not like the dry, crunchy ones you get from the store. It’s more like a flat cake than a cookie.”
He looked into the pot and I waited for him to make some crack about the contents, ready to defend my lola’s recipe, but all he said was, “Smells good as hell.” Which was about as positive as Chase got, let’s be real.
“That’s because it is,” I said. “Be nice and I’ll give you some later.”
The bell over the door rang and Chase headed back out front, but I caught the ghost of a smile as he sauntered past me and said in an undertone, “You can give me some later, all right.”
I almost choked on air. “Um, okay. Tyler, get that in a baking tray, yeah?”
“Yup,” he said.
Chase smirked.
“Next batch of cookies is almost ready,” I said. “Peanut butter.”
His smirk softened into an actual smile. “Cool.” He rolled his eyes as the front door bell jingled again. “Okay, I’ll be back in half an hour for that biko.”
That afternoon Chaseheld a box of biko on his knees as I drove him home, and he listened carefully as I explained how long to heat them in the microwave for and how the latik went on right before they were served. He was a biko convert now. He’d devoured three pieces in about a minute at work earlier.
“You should make them for the customers,” he said.
“Maybe.” I loved that he loved it. “I’m gonna make some for Bobby first and see what he thinks.”
