Chapter 68: Sunday
Jake’s mother was eighty-three, and she still made Sunday dinner.
Not because she had to. Jake had offered to cook a thousand times (she’d declined a thousand times, citing his rice as evidence of incompetence). Not because the food was the point. Because Sunday was the point. The ritual. The gathering. The sacred, unbreakable promise that no matter what happened—in this dimension or any other—family came home on Sunday.
The kitchen was smaller now. Jake’s mother was smaller. But the doenjang-jjigae was the same, and the warmth was the same, and the way she said “you’re late” when he arrived (always at exactly the same time) was the same.
“You’re late.”
“I’m exactly on time.”
“On time is late. Early is on time. Sit.”
He sat. She served. They ate. The same dance they’d performed every Sunday for forty years, through apocalypses and academies and cosmic crises and cancer and the slow, sweet passage of ordinary time.
“Mom.”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For this. For never stopping. For making dinner when the world was ending and when it wasn’t. For treating the most powerful being in thirteen dimensions like a boy who needs to eat his vegetables.”
“You do need to eat your vegetables.”
“I know. That’s the point.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. Her fingers were thin, spotted with age, warm with a lifetime of holding things together.
“Jake. I don’t understand half of what you do. The dimensions, the mana, the cosmic this and that. But I understand dinner. I understand showing up. I understand that the most complicated things in the universe are really very simple, if you let them be.”
“What are the simple things?”
“Cook for the people you love. Eat with them. Listen to their day. And when they leave, make sure they know they can always come home.”
The bowl at the empty seat waited, as it had for years. And in the night, as it had for years, it would be empty by morning.
Because Null was still watching. Still here. Still eating Sunday soup in whatever way a cosmic Weaver ate—not with a mouth, but with the attention of someone who loved a kitchen and the family that filled it.
“Same time next week?” Jake asked his mother.
“Same time every week. Until I can’t. And then you’ll make the dinner.”
“My rice—”
“Will improve. Because it has to. Because someone needs to cook for the people who come after us.” She squeezed his hand. “That’s the real inheritance, Jake. Not the mana. The meals.”