The Recipe Tin on New Year’s Day
Mom still had out the Christmas tablecloth, the one with the red poinsettias that she keeps on until Epiphany. The kitchen smelled like pork roast and sauerkraut and the caraway in it. She has made that dinner every New Year’s of my life, for luck.
Dawn was quiet through dinner. She did not look at me much. I think she knew what she had said at Christmas, and I think she was waiting for me to bring it up, and I think she was ready with something to say back.
I did not bring it up.
We ate. Tanner had thirds. Mom told the story about the New Year’s when the power went out and Dad’s cousin cooked the pork in the wood stove, which she tells every year. Mike laughed in the right places.
After dinner, Mom poured coffee for everyone. The cups were her good ones with the gold rims. Gray light came in through the window over the sink and lay across the table.
I got up and went to the coat hooks by the back door, where I had left my tote bag. I took out the recipe tin.
When I came back to the end of the table, Dawn saw it.
I watched her see it. Her face did not change, exactly. It went still, the way a rabbit goes still in the ditch when the Jeep comes by. She knew that tin. She had watched me put the notes in it for three years.
Mom looked up. “Is that my old recipe tin? Lisa, I haven’t seen that in years.”
“It’s mine now, Mom. You gave it to me.”
I set it on the table in front of Dawn and took off the lid.
Nobody said anything. Mike set his cup down very carefully.
Dawn’s hands were flat on the poinsettia tablecloth. She did not reach for the tin. She looked at it, and then she looked up at me, and her eyes were wide and frightened, and I understood that she thought I was about to do to her exactly what she had done to me.
I reached into the tin and took out the first note.
I did not unfold it. I did not read it. I held it up so she could see her own handwriting on the outside, and then I tore it in half.
The sound was very small in that kitchen. Just a little rip.
I set the two halves down on the tablecloth.
I took out the second one and tore it in half.
Then the furnace. Then the down payment on the braces. Then the four twelve hundred dollar notes, one at a time, slowly, because I wanted her to watch each one go. Not to punish her. I wanted her to see it was really happening. Eight notes. Sixteen pieces of paper on Mom’s Christmas tablecloth.
When the tin was empty, I put the lid back on.
“Happy New Year, Dawny,” I said.
That was all I said. I had decided in the Jeep that morning that it was all I would say.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
The clock over the stove ticked. Out in the yard, one of the Schroeders’ trucks went by on the gravel, and I heard it rattle over the cattle guard.
Then Mom reached across the table and picked up one of the torn halves.
I had not thought about that. I had thought about Dawn, and about Tanner, and about keeping my promise. I had not thought about my mother picking up a piece of paper.