sodium citrate

The garage door slammed shut, and my mother threw a white bottle of shampoo into my lap without warning. "This is what your father smelled like when I met him," she said, and walked into the kitchen to put away the rest of the groceries.

"I - but - what is it?"

"It just smells like herbs."

"Oh. But - so now I'm just going to smell like my dad?"

"Well fine, if you don't appreciate the gift --"

"No no, I do. Thank you for getting it, it's - it's lovely."

She gasped suddenly, opening the fridge. "So last night at the wine tasting," she said, "I went a little nuts, and ordered some sodium citrate online."

"Sodium citrate?"

"It's an ionic compound," she began, plunging into a long explanation of the chemical bonding process of sodium citrate, which I eventually stopped listening to. She ended her speech with, "...and it makes nacho cheese sauce. Do you understand what that means? We can make any kind of cheese into nacho cheese. Swiss nacho cheese. Mozzarella nacho cheese. The possibilities are endless."

I imagined something Breaking-Bad-ish was about to happen. She would give up midwifery and start some sort of nacho cheese chemical processing plant, selling it through secret vendors without a license. 

When it finally arrived in the mail, though, it was just a packet of salt. A pan of cheese bubbled on the stove, and my mother poured chilis into it from a jar as I watched the cheese with skeptical fascination and doubt. "How much sodium citrate did you put in?"

"I don't know. Some."

"You didn't follow a recipe?"

"Nah. It's probably okay. I think."

"Looks sort of mucousy."

"Yeah."

"I heard if you get sodium citrate in your hand, it will react to the fats in your skin and turn them into soap."

"Oh, so that's why it does this to cheese. Huh."

We were hungry, so we ate it, and it was good.

I was hoping for a better story.