The Casserole With No Name

Then she turned to me and she said, I have wanted to meet you my whole life. Your wife is the reason I am alive. She told me that like it was just a fact, which it was.

Her daughter, the nine year old, is named Hazel, and Hazel took to me right away the way children take to old men who do not fuss over them. She wanted to see the spare room. I showed her the spare room.

I stood in the doorway of that room, the room I had walked past ten thousand times without a thought, and I understood for the first time in my life that a child had been born there, in a snowstorm, by my wife’s hands, and that the child’s child was now standing in it asking me what the window used to look out on.

I told her it used to look out on the garden Peg kept. I told her we would plant it again in the spring, her and me, if her mother would bring her out. Hazel said she would like that. She is a serious child.

That was last October. It has been a year now, a second year, and my life does not look anything like it did in the quiet.

I go to the Friday supper at the church now. It turns out there is one, every Friday in the fellowship hall, for anybody in the county who needs a hot meal and does not want to eat it alone.

Junie has been running it for a year and a half. That is the other thing I learned. All those Fridays she was feeding me, she was also feeding forty other people down at the church, because once that woman learned how to carry a hot dish in the cold she never stopped.

I cook now. I did not know I could, but it turns out a man who kept the books at an elevator for thirty nine years can read a recipe card just fine if he decides to.

I make Peg’s hot dish. I brown the crackers separate in butter, the way she did, the way nobody does, and I use both cans, and the first time I set it down on the church table Junie took one bite and had to turn around for a minute.

There are maybe sixty people at that Friday supper now. We have had to add tables. Old farmers whose wives have passed, like me. Young mothers having a hard stretch, like Junie once was. Kids. Anybody.

I weigh the help the way I used to weigh the trucks. I know who is light this week, who needs a little extra sent home in foil. I have gotten good at reading it off a person’s face the way Peg could.

Last Friday a young woman came in for the first time, a girl really, younger than Junie was that winter, with a baby on her hip and a look I knew. She sat at the end of the table and did not talk to anyone.