The Casserole With No Name

It was a quarter to five in the morning, black dark and cold, when I saw the headlights come slow up the street.

An old sedan, a Buick by the shape of it, pulled up to the curb and shut off its lights. For a long minute nothing happened. Then the dome light came on as the door opened, and a woman got out with a dish in her two hands.

She came up my walk slow and careful in the dark, and I watched her climb my porch steps, and I stood up out of Peg’s chair, and I opened the front door.

I will never forget her face in that porch light. She was about sixty, gray coming into her hair, in a quilted coat, and when the door opened she about dropped the dish.

She said, oh. Oh, Ray. And then she said, I am sorry, I am so sorry, and she started to cry standing on my porch at five in the morning with a hot dish in her hands.

I knew her. That was the thing that put the floor out from under me. I knew her face, though I had not seen it in a long, long time.

It was June Caldwell. We had always called her Junie. And the last time I had stood this close to Junie Caldwell, she had been sixteen years old, and it had been the winter of 1986.

I need to go back forty years now, because you cannot understand the porch until you understand the winter.

In the winter of 1986 I was a younger man with a young family, and Peg and I had been married sixteen years, and we lived in the same house I am sitting in now.

There was a girl in town named Junie Caldwell. Her people were hard people. Her father ran a gravel operation out past the river and he was known for his temper, and her mother was gone, run off or dead, I never knew which.

Junie got herself in trouble, the way they used to say it, when she was sixteen. She got pregnant by a boy who left for the service and never came back, and when her father found out, he put her out of the house in December.

I did not know any of this at the time. I want to be clear about that. I was at the elevator six days a week and I did not know the first thing about a sixteen year old girl sleeping in the Methodist church entryway because her father had locked the door on her.

Peg knew. Peg always knew those things. She was on the altar guild and she went to the church early on Sunday to do the flowers, and one Sunday in December she found Junie asleep on the floor of the entryway wrapped in her coat.