What My Mother Hid in the Recipe Box
I could hear Greg’s voice behind her, asking what it was.
“I’m going to give you Hadley’s emergency number and Jeff Purdy’s cell,” I said. “He’s the plumber. Tell him it’s Bernice Castle’s and he’ll come. Have you got a pencil?”
She had a pencil. I will give her that. She wrote down both numbers and she read them back to me, and by a quarter past six Hadley’s had her card and her say-so.
Then I stayed, because that part was mine to choose. Walt and I mopped the floor with bath towels before it could freeze solid. He brought over two electric heaters from his garage and we set one in the cellar by the water meter and one in the upstairs bath. He drained what he could out of the lines. The oil truck backed in at nine with its chains on. The driver filled both tanks and bled the burner and stood there till it caught.
He tore the ticket off his clipboard and looked at the two of us.
“Who gets this?”
“I’ll see she gets it,” I said.
Five hundred forty gallons at $3.99, plus the Sunday call and the burner restart. Two thousand three hundred dollars, to the penny.
Jeff Purdy came after church. He cut a square out of my mother’s kitchen wall the size of a cookie sheet, sweated in a new length of copper, and left the hole open to dry. Six hundred and forty.
By one in the afternoon the radiators were ticking. I got out my wallet for Walt, for the heaters and the morning.
He put his hand up like a man stopping traffic.
“Put that away.”
“Walt, you’ve been here since before six.”
“I was up.” He zipped his coat. “You want to do something for me, you make me one of your mother’s coffee cakes sometime. The sour cream one with the nuts in the middle. I haven’t had it since she took sick.”
“I can do that,” I said.
That night I could not get warm. I took a hot bath in my little tub and put on two pairs of socks, and I was still cold right through the middle.
I thought about the coffee cake. It seemed like something I could do with my hands.
I sat down at the table and pulled the recipe box over. For the first time, I made myself go past the front few cards.
It was not under C. I looked under S for sour cream. I looked under B for breakfast and D for desserts. My mother’s filing had gotten to be its own system toward the end, I knew that. I had once found the electric bill in the bread box.
So I did what I should have done in January. I took the cards out. All of them, a handful at a time, forty years of them, and stacked them on the table, right down to the bare wood.
There was an envelope lying flat on the bottom of the box.
It was one of her long white ones from the church stationery. My name was on the front in her handwriting, the after-the-stroke handwriting, where every letter leaned and shook and got there anyway.
Robin.
And under that, smaller:
Read this before you are sore at your sister.
Beneath the envelope was a small gray book with a soft cover, the size of a passport. I did not know what it was yet. I set it to one side.