The Casserole With No Name

I buried my wife on a Tuesday in October, and by that Friday I had already forgotten how to feed myself.

That is not a figure of speech. I stood in my own kitchen the first Friday night alone, and I could not remember what a man is supposed to do at six o’clock.

Peg had done it for forty one years. The pan, the salt, the little radio on the windowsill tuned to the AM station out of Carroll.

I had eaten what she set in front of me every night of our marriage, and I had never once stopped to wonder how it got there.

Now there was nobody to set anything down, and I stood at the counter in my sock feet, and the house was so quiet I could hear the clock in the front room.

My name is Raymond Dolan. Most people in Alden have called me Ray since I was a boy, and I am sixty eight years old.

I spent thirty nine years at the co-op elevator out on the county road, weighing grain trucks and keeping the books, and I was good at it because I like things that add up.

Grief does not add up. That was the first thing it taught me. You carry a number your whole life, and then one Tuesday the number is gone, and nothing on the page makes sense anymore.

The church ladies came the first week, the way they do. They brought ham and buns and a Jell-O salad with the little marshmallows, and they sat with me and said the kind things.

Then the first week ended, the way it does, and the casseroles stopped, and the cards slowed down, and the phone rang less, and I was left in a clean quiet house with a wife’s coat still hanging by the back door.

I did not take the coat down. I want to say that now, so you understand what kind of shape I was in. A man who will not move a coat is not a man who is thinking about supper.

So that first Friday I ate crackers standing up, and I went to bed at eight, and I lay there in the dark on my half of the bed, careful as ever not to cross the middle, and I thought that this was the rest of my life now.

The next Friday morning there was a dish on the porch.

I almost stepped on it going out for the paper. A glass baking dish, the old heavy kind, covered tight with foil and a brown rubber band snapped around the rim to hold it.

There was no note. No name taped to the top, no card, no casserole dish with masking tape on the bottom the way the church ladies always labeled theirs so they would get them back.