The Casserole With No Name

That was the Friday I started to get scared of it, a little. Not scared of the person. Scared of what it was doing to me. I had built my whole week around a mystery, and I did not know if I wanted it solved, because solving it might make it stop.

My daughter Carrie is the one who finally said the thing out loud. She was out visiting in February, and she saw the dish on the counter, and she asked about it, and I told her the whole business.

She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, Dad, somebody loves you. You know that, right. Somebody out there loved Mom or loves you or both, and this is them loving you, and you are treating it like a crime to solve.

I did not have an answer for that. I think she was right. I think I had turned a kindness into a case because a case I could work, and a kindness I did not know what to do with.

Carrie said, why don’t you just stay up and see. Not to catch them. Just to say thank you. And bring them inside out of the cold, for heaven’s sake, whoever they are.

I told her I would think about it. The truth is I was afraid. I was afraid that if I opened the door, the person on the other side would be embarrassed, and would stop, and I would lose the one steady thing I had.

So I let it go through the end of winter. March came, and the snow went gray and then went to mud, and the casseroles kept coming, Friday after Friday, warm under the foil with the brown rubber band.

A full year is a long time to be fed by a ghost. By the time the next October came around, by the time the anniversary of Peg’s funeral came back the way those days always do, I had eaten more than fifty of those hot dishes.

Fifty Fridays. Fifty times somebody had risen in the dark and cooked my wife’s recipe and driven to my porch and left before I woke, asking nothing, taking only the empty dish.

It was the anniversary that finally made me do it. The year had turned all the way around, and I could not stand to let another Friday go by without knowing whose hands had been keeping me alive.

So that Thursday night I did not go to bed. I made a pot of coffee at ten o’clock, which a man my age has no business doing, and I turned off every light in the front of the house, and I sat in Peg’s chair by the window with my coat on.

I sat there through the ten o’clock news and the weather. I sat there past midnight. The furnace kicked on and off. The clock in the front room ticked. I nodded off twice and caught myself.