The Hundred Year Starter She Stole

The Note

Now. About the note.

Darlene did not invent the idea that Vera had promised her the starter. She had been laying that groundwork for two years, and she was patient about it. At Roy’s birthday supper she’d say, in front of everybody, “Vera, you know I’m the only one who’d keep it going right,” and Mom would smile and change the subject, because Vera did not do conflict at the table. At Christmas Darlene brought Mom a fancy new crock with a rubber gasket, a nice one, a hundred-dollar crock, and said it was so the starter would have “a proper forever home,” and everyone thought it was a sweet gift and I thought it was a woman staking a claim.

I told my mother once, at her sink, drying while she washed. I said, “Mom, Darlene wants the crock.” And Vera, who was eighty-three and sharper than any of us gave her credit for, kept washing and said, “I know she does.” That was all. I thought she was being passive. I understand now she was already three moves ahead of me, and I will get to that.

Vera went into the hospital in Des Moines on a Wednesday in March with pneumonia, and she died on the following Monday, the seventeenth. Five days. She was never really lucid after the Thursday. The doctors had her on the high-flow oxygen and something for the pain, and her hands, which had shaped ten thousand loaves, could not have held a pen if you’d taped it to her fingers. I was there. Roy was there. Darlene came Saturday and Sunday and sat in the corner on her phone.

The note Darlene showed the sheriff’s deputy, the note she waved on my porch, was dated Friday the fourteenth. It was on a page torn from the little spiral pad Mom kept by the phone, in handwriting that looked, at a glance, like my mother’s. It said: Darlene is to have my starter and the crock. She is the only one who will do it right. Vera Lindgren.

Here is what I knew the second I saw it, and what I did not say. My mother never once in her life wrote the word “starter.” Not on a recipe card, not on a note, not anywhere. She called it “the sponge.” It was an old word, Ingrid’s word, Alma’s word, the word all four generations used at that counter, and it drove Vera a little crazy that the young people online called it a “starter” like it was a car engine. She would have gnawed her arm off before she wrote “my starter” in her own hand. She would have written “the sponge.” Anyone who had stood at that counter with her knew it. Darlene had stood at that counter maybe four times in her life, always to be seen standing there, and she’d copied the word off the website she learned from.

The second thing. The fourteenth was a Friday. On Friday the fourteenth my mother could not lift a spoon of applesauce to her own mouth. I fed her lunch. There was no pen in that room, and there was no note written in it.

So Darlene had forged a note, and dated it to a day my mother was already past writing, and used a word my mother never used, and I stood on my porch and let her think she’d gotten away clean. Because a forged note is a small crime, and I did not want Darlene charged with a small crime. I wanted her to build her whole new life on that crock, out loud, in the newspaper, in front of everyone, and then I wanted the truth to take it out from under her all at once. You cannot get that from a forgery charge. You can only get it by waiting.

I also had one more reason to wait, and it was the biggest one, and I did not tell a living soul. Not Roy. Not my daughter. Not the deputy. I will tell you when Darlene tells the county.