Sunday night was the first dinner Judy and I had with our hockey boy. He had gotten back from Minnesota by bus before sunrise and helped our other hockey player, who was leaving Sunday, pack a few things before going to bed. When he woke up, he woke in a house that had only one hockey billet living in it—the guy he saw in the mirror.

He talked to us about the previous week of hockey life before meeting one of the other players for breakfast. The team had lost all three games at the Showcase. He claimed the somewhat lopsided scores weren’t the result of the goalies. They were the result of defensemen who had lost their first love. They prefer offense to defense.

I was a little nervous about the responsibility that had been handed to me for dinner. I marinated the chicken like I always do. The remaining hockey boy was the one with the pork allergy, which meant this wasn’t just a matter of putting dinner on the table. Now I had a small food-safety operation involving a teenager, a grill and my reputation as a competent adult.

I had already sprayed a couple of types of oven cleaner on the cooking grates. I scraped and scrubbed them, trying to remove every memory the grates had ever had of touching a sausage or a rack of ribs. I heated the grill to “really hot” a couple of times to cook off anything that might still be left on the grates. At that point, I was pretty sure the grill was cleaner than most surgical equipment.

And beyond all that, it would make me physically sick if something I fed him caused a reaction. I didn’t want to be the guy who sent our hockey player upstairs for the evening because Dad couldn’t properly decontaminate a grill.

After 5:00, Judy put the smashed potatoes into the oven to bake. The potatoes had already been boiled, so they would crisp up nicely. Paprika, onion and garlic powder, salt and pepper made these things almost good enough to eat without ketchup. Judy and the hockey boy seem to think Chick-fil-A sauce makes them even better.

The roasted broccoli isn’t incredible, but it does round out the textures the meal offers.

In parallel with everything else, Judy threw together some dough for cinnamon rolls. It quickly became clear she had done something to spank the yeast a little too hard. She gave the dough some more yeast vitamins and hoped she could salvage them. One tray would be for the “three of us.” Until we get another hockey boy, that’s what we are. The other tray would be for the family that had just had twins—aka my daughter’s family.

Shortly after 6:00, we sat down for dinner. I had some reservations about saying a Christian prayer with our Jewish hockey boy. Yes, the pork allergy does add a certain level of irony to that sentence. But Judy showed no hesitation, and we prayed.

As he ate his first plate, I kept waiting for him to spasm and fall off his chair. Then he had a second piece of chicken. Then a third. He let me know that any ill effects would take a little time to show up, which was exactly the kind of information I wanted to hear while eating dinner.

I attempted to enjoy my meal while still dealing with taste buds whose sensitivity had been dialed back to almost COVID-like levels. Would I pass this test? Would his mom come down hard on me if I fed him something that took him off his game? After dinner, he grabbed a couple of waters and headed upstairs. He’d let me know how he was doing when he came back down.

That was reassuring.

Sort of.

After Judy’s transformation back into her normal self while the “dish fairy” cleaned up the kitchen a few days ago, the dishes were piling up again. We put the leftovers we actually observed into appropriate containers and put them into the refrigerator. It appeared the dirty dishes would get at least another day to thrive while minimizing the amount of usable space on our counters.

While our hockey boy watched football, played video games or talked to important people in his life, including his hockey advisor, Judy coaxed the reluctant cinnamon rolls into a fluffy enough form that they should bake up okay. She covered them with cream cheese icing, which made whatever yeast trauma they had experienced earlier largely irrelevant.

They were good, and our hockey boy even decided they were worth the calories. He also let me know I hadn’t served him any flawed chicken. The pork cooties from the grill had been successfully purged, and I was free from guilt.

At least where the chicken was concerned.

After watching our show—we’re in Season 5 of Modern Family—we went to bed and read for a while. At some point, we heard noise in the kitchen that involved the microwave. Was chicken being heated up? Was another cinnamon roll being consumed? Was he eating something else?

At least one of those questions had to be answered “yes.”

I didn’t think much more about it until morning.

I started the coffee and inventoried the cinnamon rolls. No obituaries were necessary.

Then I thought about the chicken.

I looked in the refrigerator and didn’t see the chicken pan. I looked around the kitchen, wondering where that pan might have ended up. Of course, it was at the bottom of the stack of last night’s dishes.

And the chicken was still in it.

It had been sitting there the whole time.

For more than twelve hours, my carefully prepared, grill-decontaminated, pork-free chicken had been conducting a completely different food-safety experiment.

If we’d caught it before bed, we might have salvaged it. At that point, though, the difficult but correct move was to throw it away.

I tried to express my frustration to Judy without pointing fingers. Ultimately, we share the kitchen, so I deserve as much blame as she does. The bigger downer, at least from my perspective, was that I had spent all that time preparing and cooking the chicken. I had already factored it into the meal plans for the rest of the week.

Fried rice? Barbecue chicken pizza? Rice bowls?

All of those plans would now have to be rejiggered around the chicken that no longer existed.

Darn.

Just because we’re old and have accumulated a little wisdom doesn’t mean we’re always wise. Sometimes we assume the other person has something handled because, in our heads, of course they do. A simple question can prevent twelve hours of perfectly good chicken from becoming garbage.

And if you’re afraid of being considered a whiny nag, there’s a choice to make. Would you rather take the grilled chicken you labored over to the trash can with your tail between your legs, or get a little pushback from your wife because you asked whether somebody put it away?

Maybe this is the reminder I needed to take my role as the resident protein policeman more seriously.

I just need to figure out what hat a protein policeman wears.