The Soup I Carried Next Door

“Well, they’re on my side now, aren’t they,” he said gently. “Somebody had to. Elaine said they were yours no matter what any stake said, and I was to keep them alive till you came for them. They bloomed fine this year. Pink ones did best.”

That was when I cried. I had held out through everything else.

Aaron’s arm came around me. That time I leaned into it.

It was Emma who broke it, bless her.

“Is there any more of the soup?” she said. “Because I still didn’t get any.”

There was a wet kind of laugh around the table. Don blew his nose like a truck horn.

“It’s in jars next door,” Mr. Halverson said. “I could fetch one.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Verna said. She let go of his hand and wiped her face with the heel of her palm, and I watched her put herself back together, one piece at a time, into a woman with something to do. “Those are yours. Molly.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got canned chicken in the basement. Quart jars, I put up fourteen last fall, broth and all. Carrots, onion, I’ve got celery.” She stopped. It cost her something to say the next part, and she said it anyway. “Would you show me how you made it? I haven’t had my hands in that soup in thirty years and I don’t trust myself with the nutmeg.”

I could have made her wait for it. I thought about that, for about as long as it takes to think it.

“I’ll make the broth,” I said. “You do the rivels. You probably remember them better than the book does.”

“Flour, egg, salt,” Verna said. “You rub it between your palms. Elaine said mine came out like gravel.”

“They did,” said Mr. Halverson. “She ate them anyway.”

I want to tell you how that kitchen looked for the next forty minutes, because it is the thing I go back to.

Aaron went down for the jars and carried up four. Kim chopped. Verna stood at her own counter with flour to her wrists, rubbing rivels between her palms and dropping them onto a dish towel, and she kept stopping to look at them as if they belonged to somebody else. Mr. Halverson sat in the chair Lloyd pulled up to the kitchen table for him, with Elaine’s cookbook open in front of him to page 41. He did not turn the page once.

When the broth came up to a simmer, I measured out the dill and held the spoon over the pot. Then I thought better of it and handed the spoon to Verna.

“More for V.,” I said.

She looked at the spoon. She looked at me. I do not think anyone had teased my mother-in-law in a long while.

“She won’t ask,” Verna said, and her mouth trembled into something. “Give it to her anyway.” And she tipped in the whole spoonful, and then half of another.

Before she called everyone back to the table she stopped me by the stove, the two of us alone for a second with the lid rattling.

“You went through that gate without knowing a thing,” she said.

“I only knew he ate by himself.”

“I knew that too,” Verna said. “I’ve known it for fifteen years. I’ve watched it out that window every night of my life.” She looked at her floury hands. “I’d understand if you didn’t care to come back here on a Sunday.”