The smell of oil on a griddle fills the care home’s kitchen. My mother squeezes scrambled eggs between her fingers and a fork and shoves them in her mouth. A clump of yellow clings to her chin.

Her old proclamations run through my head. Eating grapefruit will make you skinny. V-necks will make you look taller. Egg whites have more iron than yolks.

I’m here to interrogate my mother about that last one.

As a teen, I experienced bouts of tiredness, and went to bed early or napped after school. My mother dragged me to the doctor’s office. The gruff, white-bearded family doctor ran a few tests and later phoned the house.

“It’s anemia from an iron deficiency,” my mother said, hanging up the beige telephone handset at the kitchen desk.

“What does that mean?” I huffed. Slammed my books down on the oval table.

She returned to the stove and stirred a pot of sauce. “You have limited red blood cells and need more iron. Look it up in the encyclopedia.” Of course. Where all our questions went to die. “He prescribed iron pills.”

The prescription for the pills included instructions for adding iron to my diet. The perfect meal plan for a teenager: spinach, oatmeal, and eggs. All I wanted was the grease my adolescence afforded me. “The whites of them,” my mother said, mimicking the doctor’s stern tone. She pushed egg whites. I pushed back.

On Sunday mornings after church, she whipped up a gluttonous brunch with Italian sausage flecked with fennel, juicy cantaloupe, and eggs, cooked sunny side up. “The whites have more iron,” my mother said as she slid two eggs with singed edges onto my plate, while my siblings dipped their toast in the egg yolks and whispered to each other about my downfall. In turn, I buried a few slimy slabs of egg in my napkin and snuck them in my pocket for disposal later.

Now, at eighty-eight, my mother attentively chews on a sausage link. I study her facial features. There are no signs of deception in her cheekbones, forehead, or laugh lines. Only skin still smooth as a baby’s bottom after her shower. Her memory loss has removed a few wrinkle lines too. She doesn’t know who I am. So why I am here?

After forty years, I finally investigated her egg whites claim.

She stabs at more food on her plate. Shreds of hash browns that slip between her fingers. A split segment of orange spills its juice on her shirt.

In my mind, I present a spirited argument against her as the defendant. I was forced to digest spinach served with a side of the Popeye song sung by siblings, wasn’t I? She told me I liked oatmeal cookies with raisins, didn’t she? Then I verbally charge forth. “Did you know only three percent of iron in eggs comes from the whites? Why would you lie?” My mouth foams at the memory of it once being washed out with soap for a fib I told.

My mother licks at her fingers with the fullness of her vulnerability on display. Head bent toward the table; her eyes shift in my direction. She raises her sparse eyebrows away from the shriveling eggs, weepy hazel eyes locked on my hardened ones, and sticks another fingerful of eggs in her mouth.

Annette Januzzi Wick

is a writer and teacher, and the author of I’ll Have Some of Yours: What my mother taught me about dementia, cookies, music, the outside, and her life inside a care home (Three Arch Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in 3rd Act Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Edible Ohio Valley, Italian Americana, Italy Segreta, La Gazzetta, nextavenue.org, Ovunque Siamo, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Her book Something Italian: Essays and recipes from the family table is forthcoming in 2025 from University of Akron Press.

Author’s website: https://annettejwick.com