Mum's Handwriting

There were forty-one recipe cards in the tin. Forty-one, and I know she wrote more than that, because I remember a lemon drizzle that isn't there and a stew with barley that isn't there either, and neither of them exist anywhere else on earth now. I'm a data engineer. It's not a glamorous job. I move rows from one place to another and I make sure nobody's phone number ends up in a column called "notes". But I know enough to be dangerous, and about three months after the funeral I scanned every card at 600 dpi and started, I suppose, to build her back. The handwriting model was the easy part. There are open weights for that sort of thing, you feed it a few hundred samples and it learns the loop on your g's, the way you never quite close an a. Hers slanted right and got worse toward the bottom of the card, like she was rushing to finish before the oven timer went. The model learned that too. The first time I generated a line and it drifted downhill exactly the way hers did, I had to leave the room. The recipes themselves were harder, and this is where I think I crossed some line I can't name. I gave a language model all forty-one cards, plus the two I could remember the shape of, and asked it to write the lemon drizzle. It did. It used "a good knob of butter", which she said. It said "don't be stingy with the zest", which she also said, and which I'm certain was on the original card because I remember laughing at it. Then I rendered it in her hand and printed it on a card the same size as the others and put it in the tin. My sister came round on the Sunday. She was going through the tin for the parkin recipe, and she stopped, and she pulled out the lemon drizzle and held it for a long time. "I thought this was lost," she said. I should have told her then. I didn't. I said something like "it turned up", which is technically true.

She read it out loud. "Don't be stingy with the zest." She laughed exactly the way I'd laughed at eleven years old. "God, she really did say that, didn't she." "She did." "It's wrong though." She tapped the card. "She did it with three lemons, not two. I remember because she'd always make me juice the third one and I hated it." Two lemons. The model had guessed two. It didn't know about my sister and the third lemon, because nobody had written that down, because you don't write down the things you assume you'll always remember. I told her that night, over the phone, because I couldn't do it to her face. There was a long silence and then she said, "Can you make it say three?" So I did. The card in the tin now says three lemons, in my mother's hand that isn't, in a recipe she wrote that she didn't. My sister knows. I know. When my niece inherits the tin she probably won't, and I keep turning that over and not landing anywhere. The barley stew I haven't done. I don't remember enough of it to check the answer, and I've learned that's the part that matters.