The Recipe Tin on New Year’s Day
I carry the mail. I have had a rural route out of our little post office in northeast Iowa for nineteen years, a hundred and eight miles of gravel and blacktop and four hundred and sixty boxes. I am in bed by nine most nights, because I am casing mail by seven.
So when the phone rang at a quarter to ten, I knew it was bad news before I picked it up.
It was Dawn, crying so hard I could not understand her at first. She was parked in the lot behind the Casey’s in town. Rick had moved out for good that afternoon and taken the checkbook with him.
“I need a lawyer,” she said. “The one in Decorah wants a two thousand dollar retainer just to start. I have four hundred and eleven dollars, Lisa. That’s all I have in the world.”
I sat up in bed. Mike was already awake beside me, listening.
“Where’s Tanner?”
“At Mom’s. I told her I had a late shift.” She took a ragged breath. “I don’t want her to know. You know how she gets. She’ll worry herself sick and then she’ll try to give me money she doesn’t have.”
That was true. Mom lives on Social Security and the cash rent from her ground, which she has rented to the Schroeder boys for years. She would have handed Dawn her grocery money and gone without.
I looked at Mike. He nodded before I even asked.
“I’ll bring you a check in the morning,” I said.
Dawn was waiting at the end of her driveway when I came by on my route the next day. She had a piece of notebook paper folded in her hand, and she pushed it at me through the window of my Jeep before I could hand her the check.
I unfolded it. In her round, careful handwriting, the same handwriting she had used on her spelling tests when I was helping her study at Mom’s kitchen table thirty years ago, it said: I owe my sister Lisa $2,000. I will pay it back. Dawn. And the date.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
“Yes, I do.” Her chin was up. Her eyes were swollen. “I’m not a charity case. I’m going to pay you back every cent, and I want it written down.”
So I took it. I did not know what else to do with it, so I put it in the recipe tin when I got home.
It is an old red-and-white metal tin, dented on one corner from the time I dropped it on Mom’s porch steps. Mom gave it to me full of her recipe cards the week I married Mike. It sits on the shelf above my stove, and nobody in my house opens it but me.
That was the first one.
The second was the rest of the retainer, fifteen hundred dollars, two months later when the lawyer ran through the first two thousand. Rick had decided to fight over the house. Dawn wrote another note. I owe Lisa $1,500. Dawn. Into the tin it went.
The furnace went out the next January, in a cold snap when it was eighteen below at night.
Tanner called me that time, not Dawn. He was fourteen then. His voice was still cracking.
“Aunt Lisa, the house is really cold,” he said. “Mom’s trying to fix it with a hair dryer. I don’t think that’s how you fix it.”