What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
“Would you read that part again, please,” I said.
Mr. Aldridge looked at me over his glasses. He was not a man who enjoyed his work that morning. He smoothed the page flat on his desk with the side of his hand and read it again, slower.
“To my daughter Michelle Ann, I leave my house and lot at 41 Mill Street, together with its furnishings. To my daughter Robin Lynn, I leave the sum of five hundred dollars and my recipe box.”
The radiator under his window knocked twice, the way old steam heat does when it is getting ready to work.
That was all there was. My mother had never been one to use a lot of words.
My sister was sitting in the other leather chair with her good coat still on. The color came up her neck and into her face, right to the collar.
“Rob,” she said. “I didn’t know. I swear to you I did not know.”
I believed her. I have gone back over that morning more times than I can count, and I believed her then and I believe her now. That was almost the worst part of it. There was nobody in the room to be angry at except a woman who had been buried for five days.
“It’s all right,” I said, which it was not.
“We can fix it,” Michelle said. “Can’t we fix it? Mr. Aldridge, can’t I just sign something?”
“There are things you can do in time, Mrs. Brandt,” he said carefully. “I would ask you both not to decide anything today.”
I stood up. My knees did what they were supposed to do, which surprised me.
“Thank you, Mr. Aldridge,” I said.
He stood up too. He went to the cabinet behind his desk and brought out my mother’s recipe box, the wooden one with the dovetailed corners that my father made her the first year they were married. She must have sent it over to his office herself, sometime in the fall. I had not even noticed it was gone from the shelf over the stove.
He did not hand it across the desk. He came around and set it in my two hands, like something that might spill.
“Your mother was particular about this,” he said. “She wanted you to take it home today, and she wanted you to go through it. She said that twice.”
I heard him the way you hear a television in another room. I nodded. I carried the box down his stairs and out onto Main Street, into eleven degrees and a wind off the lake, and I set it on the passenger seat of my Buick and buckled the seat belt across it. Then I sat there with the engine running until the windshield cleared.
Nine years. I had lived in that house and nursed her in it for nine years.
Marlow is a small town up on the edge of the Tug Hill, north of Utica, where the snow comes in off Lake Ontario and does not stop to ask. We measure it in feet.
My mother, Bernice Castle, had her stroke the second week of October, nine years ago. She was seventy-one. She was standing at the kitchen counter cutting up apples and her left hand simply stopped belonging to her. She had the presence of mind to sit down on the floor before she fell down on it, and that was where the mailman saw her through the storm door.