The Casserole With No Name

I will tell you honestly, there was a stretch of winter in there where that Friday casserole was the only thing I looked forward to.

My son Michael called every Sunday from Des Moines, and my daughter Carrie called on Wednesdays from Omaha, and they were good about it, they were.

But a phone call ends, and then you are back in the quiet. A casserole on your porch is a different thing. A casserole means a person stood at your door.

I started to live Friday to Friday. I would wake up on Friday morning before it was light, and I would lie there and listen, trying to catch the sound of a car or a step on the porch boards.

I never did. Whoever it was, they were careful, and they were quiet, and they knew my house better than a stranger would.

That was the part that worked on me through December. They knew to set it behind the storm door where the wind would not get at it. They knew the porch light was burned out on the left side and the dish would be in shadow. They knew me.

I made a list. I am an elevator man, I make lists. I sat down one night with a legal pad and I wrote out every person who might know Peg’s Friday hot dish well enough to make it taste exactly right.

It is a specific thing, that hot dish. Peg browned the crackers separate in butter before she put them on, which nobody does, and she used a can of the tomato soup and a can of the whole tomatoes both, which I had watched her do a hundred times and never understood.

Whoever was cooking for me did it her way. The crackers browned separate. Both cans. I could taste it. This was not a woman following a recipe off a card. This was a woman who had stood in a kitchen next to my wife.

My list had eleven names on it. I crossed off eight of them over the next two weeks, one at a time, with phone calls and a couple of visits, feeling like a fool the whole time.

The three names left were women Peg had been close to over the years, and every one of them looked me in the eye and told me it was not them, and I believed them, and then I was out of names.

Christmas was hard. I will not dwell on it. The kids came and it was good to have the noise in the house, and then they left and the quiet came back twice as loud as before.

There was a casserole the Friday after Christmas, and a casserole the first Friday of the new year, through a snow that closed the county roads, which meant somebody had driven my street when the plows had not even been through.