The Forty Hens I Bought Back

“Aunt Lucille.”

“She packed me eggs. I told her for thirty years that store eggs were good enough for me, and she packed me eggs every time, and I’d get them home and they’d sit there until I threw them out.” Her mouth was not working right. “I can’t sit down in this house. Do you understand me? If I am scrubbing something I am not sitting in it. I thought if I could just get it emptied out, it would quit being hers.”

I sat down on the step beside her. The boards were cold.

I had a speech. I had worked on it in the truck, between farms, and every word in it was true.

I looked at my mother’s sister, seventy-eight years old in her good coat, and I found I could not say any of it. Kim Kroeker had seen in five minutes on her own front step what I had not let myself see in five days.

But I did not tell her it was all right, either, because it was not.

“I have thirty-one of them back,” I said. “Nine are gone, and I may never find them. Tomorrow is Saturday. Mom’s customers are coming to that door at eight o’clock like they have every Saturday since I was twelve, and they have all heard what happened, because I put it on the radio.” I kept my voice even. “I am not going to tell them who sold her hens. I am not going to tell them anything. You can be in Lincoln by then, or you can be standing at that door handing out the last eggs she packed. I’d rather you were at the door. But that’s yours to decide.”

She did not answer right away.

“What about the realtor?” I said.

“I called her at seven this morning.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, hard, the way Mom did. “I told her I had spoken out of turn and the place was not mine to list. She was very nice about it.”

Then she put her car keys in her coat pocket.

Saturday came up clear and cold, with frost on the truck and a meadowlark going on the fence post.

Lucille was dressed by six. She had on Mom’s apron again, but there was no bucket and there were no gloves. She had set the fourteen cartons out on the kitchen table in two rows with the names facing the door, and she had Lu’s carton off to one side by the sugar bowl, and she kept touching it.

The first car pulled in at ten minutes to eight.

I stood back by the stove with my coffee and let my aunt open that door.

It was the school cook. She had two empty cartons in her hand, the way they all did, because you did not come for Rosalie’s eggs without bringing your empties back.

“I’m Lucille,” my aunt said. “I’m Rosalie’s sister.” “I’m the one who sold her hens. I thought I was helping, and I was wrong, and I am sorry for it. These are yours. She packed them herself.”

The school cook looked at her. Then she looked at the name on the lid, in pencil, in a dead woman’s hand, and she pressed that carton against her chest.