1. Jill is supposed to ask before she uses the oven, or, as her mother says, the whole house might burn down, and her parents are busy yelling at each other, so she mixes the powder with water from the tap in the bathroom, standing on the wooden step stool painted with daisies that her dad made so she can wash her hands, and she takes the mixture back to her room and sits on her bed and looks at it. Her dad is saying something about working and her mom is saying something about taking care of the kids. She could slide it into the side of the oven—she has done this many times all by herself—but if her mom comes upstairs while it's cooking, or while her room still smells like burnt chocolate like it does now every time she uses the oven ever since the time Lisa hit it and her cake pan tipped over, then her mom will know and she, Jill, will be grounded. She retires to the closet and pulls the cord to turn on the one bare bulb and closes the door and secretly eats the yellow batter. It's sweet. With the door closed and her clothes as insulation, she can't hear the yelling. She licks the cake pan clean and turns out the light and sits in the dark, leaning her head back against a stack of corduroy pants.

2. The rain has stopped but the air is still swollen with damp, so Jill and Lisa are playing inside. They made sugar cookie dough with Jill's mother's recipe and are cooking them a few at a time in the cake pan. Lisa has taken over the job of officiously sliding the cake pan into the side of the oven. Jill is using her mother's miniature cookie cutters to make stars and hearts. She hears Gary's voice downstairs and clatters down to see him. Gary is chiefly famous in their town for driving his car into the bronze statue of Mayor Orville Pearl in the town square. "I made cookies," she says, "see?" and he eats one and says she's the best cook in the family. He looks over at their mother, who is reading a letter. "When do you have to go?" she says to him, and her voice sounds strange. "It's all in there, Mom," he says. Jill looks back and forth between them, and then her dad comes home and he reads the letter too and has to sit down and doesn't care about Jill's cookie when she brings him one.

3. When he divorces her mom, Jill's father takes the oven, telling her mom she can use the real one he got her when they married if she wants to show Jill how to make something so damn much. So every month Jill gets one weekend with the oven. Her dad buys her all the expensive mixes made especially for the oven instead of giving her a box of regular cake mix like her mother did. Her mother's cake mix tastes better than her dad's, but she never allows the slightest hint of this to cross her mind when she's at his house. She makes cakes for him, and when they don't come out right she feeds them to the puppy he got her to play with, who gulps them down without chewing. It always looks like he's on the verge of choking, but he never does.

4. Jill understands that the girl's job is to feed people. Her father makes this plain the first time she sleeps at his small apartment by opening a can of stew and burning it in the pot. He messes her hair and says, "I'll get it right next time, princess," but she notices that he doesn't. This was her mom's job and it's not right that he should have to do it. She starts taking leftovers from the fridge and making her own miniature pizzas with whatever she finds there: old pizza (this is easiest), green peas, corn, tomatoes, half-eaten hamburgers, all put on a piece of bread she flattens with her hand and cuts with the metal cake tray for a crust. Her dad eats them all with every evidence of enjoyment, but he likes her cakes the best. Sometimes she slides bits of pizza to the puppy, who bolts them down and sniffs her fingers for more.

5. Gary writes from Vietnam to ask for some of her little cakes, so she makes him an even dozen. They're yellow and a little lumpy. She frosts them with the tub of pre-made chocolate frosting her dad buys. When they cool, he helps her wrap them in two layers of plastic wrap (one layer going up and the other going down, so none of the frosting will ooze out) and stack them in a box into which she has already put several pairs of socks, underwear, a LIFE Magazine (the one with Jackie Kennedy Onassis on the cover), and a long letter she has been writing in parts which is mostly sloppy drawings of the puppy. His belongings are all that come back to them: Jackie dog-eared with a permanent crease down her middle, a photograph of Tammy from down the street in a pink bathing suit leaning awkwardly against a car, his dog tags, which Jill takes to wearing, some clothes her mother gives to the Goodwill so she won't have to look at them, and three of Jill's little cakes, that he must have been saving for some special occasion, hard as fossils.