4:57 PM
Ivy was listening intently, her left ear lightly caressing the grainy surface of the faintly ajar wooden door before her. She stood painfully still so as not to disturb the silence with the predictable, sanity-wrenching screech of the oil-deprived door hinges. Hearing a steady thrum of running water at last, she crept past the door toward the kitchen. The old floorboards flexed and creaked in a dissonant cacophony.

It was 4:57 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and Ivy was characteristically unprepared. The Christmas gifts she gave were always handmade with stress built in every stitch. Tonight, she would be finished, but she knew she mustn’t drop her guard; her mother liked to snoop.

The mustard yellow, mosaic-patterned kitchen floor tiles were cold against her feet as she stood, organizing her thoughts. Her mother’s gift was relatively simple, but what it lacked in creativity it returned in artful deceit. That she had spent the majority of the previous two days making these for her aunts under her mother’s watchful eye would only increase the irony. She knew, though, that her time was limited, and she wouldn’t be able to finish in the brief period she had before her one-on-one time with the kitchen would end. Her eyes scanned the list in her hand.

Chunky Chocolate
Bar Mix

3/4 C. brown sugar
1/2 C. sugar
1/4 C. cocoa powder
1/2 C. chopped pecans
1 C. jumbo chocolate chips
1 3/4 C. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Ivy nodded and knelt down in front of the cabinets in search of Ziploc bags. The ingredients would be taking a trip to her bedroom closet in an orange shoebox, and they needed separation in transit. She tugged the cabinet door open, and an assortment of tangled trinkets slid raucously to the floor. Ivy flinched violently and froze, listening for the inevitable sound of slippered footsteps, but heard nothing. Hastily, she shoved all but the box in question back into the cabinet and stood, her heartbeat only slightly accelerated. Maybe she should have just cleaned out the cabinets for Christmas.

Sighing, she read the ingredient list yet again, noting this time that the measurements were all divisible by four, so she would only need one measuring cup and one measuring spoon. She extracted them carefully from the far left drawer and placed them on the countertop. From the pantry she pulled a squat bag of brown sugar, secured with a worn green twist-tie. The gritty clumps were soon transferred in appropriate amounts to a pristine new container. Ivy’s fingernails protested as she sealed the bag and the coarse substance, which she had been careful not to spill, nonetheless invaded her cuticles. The moment her grip on the bag was relinquished, the air grew still with the sudden ceasing of noise. Ivy strained her ears. The water had stopped.

With a masterfully stifled groan of irritation, she thrust the teaspoon, measuring cup, empty Ziploc bags, and brown sugar into the shoebox and did a strange sort of tiptoeing leap back to her bedroom, where she placed the box in a corner, opened the closet door to conceal it, and plucked a book from her bookshelf for a bit of light reading. Eighty-seven seconds later, a toweled head poked in her bedroom door. “Is everything all right in here? I thought I heard a crash….”

Ivy’s face was the epitome of innocence. “I didn’t hear anything….”

6:17 PM

At precisely 6:17 PM, Ivy’s mother could be found donning her long, black winter coat at the front door. “Ivy! I’m going to the grocery store. We’re out of brown sugar, and I need it for the cookies. Do you want to come?” Ivy winced to herself as she closed her book. She’d thought all the baking had been taken care of already. It was Christmas Eve, for goodness’ sake!

“Ah… I’d better not, Mom! I’ve got to… uhm….” Work on my ability to lie convincingly? “…Study. For finals.” Ivy was agitated at herself, at her cuticles, and at the narrator in her head.

“Pssssh. Okay. Be good. Don’t answer the door. Call me if you need anything.” Ivy rolled her eyes, but it was half-hearted. “Okay!” she called.

Shortly thereafter, the sound of a garbage disposal at work rang through the house; the garage door was opening. Ivy collected her shoebox from the corner and traipsed down the hall again to the kitchen, where she looked out the window to see a familiar beige ’92 Honda Civic turning left out of the neighborhood. Then, she checked the supply of sugar and found that there would indeed be enough left, after she took a half cup, for cookies. She measured it, dumped it in a Ziploc bag, aggravated her cuticles some more, and repeated the process with a fourth of a cup of cocoa.

The delicacy of chopped pecans was produced next, with the aid of the terra cotta-and-white nut grinder in the cabinets. Exactly a half a cup was produced and added to the growing pile in the orange shoebox. Ivy simply took an entire bag of chocolate chips from the refrigerator; she knew for a fact that a serious miscalculation had been made earlier that week, and that consequently, there were far too many chocolate chips.

The most challenging ingredient proved to be the flour, of which one-and-three-quarter cups would be necessary. It fell out of the measuring cup, required two bags, and it left a chalky white residue on everything it touched, which included Ivy’s entire body. She was only too pleased to move on to the final three ingredients, which came in fractions of a teaspoon, and could all be placed in the same bag. The baking soda was nearly gone, but with careful shaking of the box, the requirements were met. Ivy found the salt terribly difficult to measure when it came out of all the holes at once, but she quickly learned to control it. The baking powder, if it had been handed a report card, would have seen the words a pleasure to have in class, because it caused no trouble at all.

At 7:03 PM, the garage door began to open. Ivy jumped a little, but she knew she was nearly ready. She shoved the ingredients into the shoebox and ran with it all the way to her bedroom, where she placed it inside her closet, this time, and underneath a variety of miscellaneous items. As she hurried back to the kitchen, she heard the car engine turn off. She grabbed a rag from the sink, rinsed it briefly, and ran it over every surface that had been affected by the flour’s rampage. She placed the measuring instruments back in the drawers without washing them at all. Then she raced back to her bedroom, pulled her Health books out of her backpack, brought them back to the living room, and sat still just long enough to catch her breath when her mother entered the room. “Did you know that the amount of meat you should consume each day is equal to the size of a deck of cards?”

11:44 PM

Ivy sat on the floor of her bedroom surrounded by Ziploc bags, ribbon, and cloth. She picked up the one-quart canning jar on her left and unscrewed the lid. Next, she unsealed the brown sugar bag and emptied the contents into the jar, which she then flattened, using the bottom of a very long, narrow glass. The rest of the layers followed subsequently, the flour making up for its previous misbehaviors by trickling prettily down onto the chocolate chips. It looked rather like snow. Ivy quietly forgave it.

The final Christmas gift was completed with a round piece of holiday-festooned cloth neatly secured with Merry Christmas ribbon and a note card instructing the recipient on how to bake her Chunky Chocolate Bars. Ivy scrawled a quick note on the back. It read:

Dear Mom,
I hope you enjoy your Christmas Chocolate Bars. I made yours last so there was no chance of you finding them. I’m going to hide it behind the tree now, as it isn’t wrapped. Merry Christmas!

Love,
Ivy

Ivy picked up the jar and grasped it with both hands, letting go with one only to open the bedroom door. She crept down the hall in stealth for what she sincerely hoped would be the last time of the year, then stopped dead in her tracks. Her mother grinned from the couch beside the Christmas tree, smugly. “Merry Christmas, Ivy. What’ve you got there?”