The Apron at the Pantry Table
Ten minutes went by. Rick had to call the numbers himself, off the clipboard Dena had left on the end table.
When Dena came out, she had one of Maisie’s drawings in her hands. She was holding it by the edges, with both hands, the way you hold a photograph that might tear.
Her face was wet. I had not seen Dena cry since her own mother’s funeral.
She came straight down the line to my table, past the people waiting, past Rick.
“Amber,” she said, and she held it up for me. “Who is this one for?”
It was the extra drawing. The one on the bottom of the shoebox.
Maisie had drawn our house, with smoke coming out of the chimney and five stick people in the window: a tall one with a ball cap, a ponytail one, and three little ones lined up by size.
On the porch there was a cardboard box. You could tell it was a box because she had colored it brown and drawn a turkey on the side.
Across the top, in Kaylee’s careful printing, with Maisie’s crooked letters underneath where she had copied it over herself, it said:
For our box. When it is our turn. Love Maisie.
I could not say anything at first. I put my hand over my mouth.
“She asked me if we were one of the families,” I said finally. “I told her not this week.”
Dena looked at the drawing. Then at me. Then at the people along the wall, a hundred people she had known her whole life, every one of them watching her now.
“Leon told me something back there,” she said. “Something I didn’t know anybody knew.”
I did not hear what Leon said in that stockroom until later. Dena told me herself that night, at my kitchen table, after the kids were in bed. I will tell it the way she told it to me.
When she went back into the stockroom, she sat down on a case of canned pumpkin and opened Maisie’s shoebox, because she wanted to see what I had brought. She went through every drawing. At the bottom, she found the one with our house on it.
She was sitting there holding it when Leon came in with his cap in his hand. He did not ask what was wrong. He leaned against the chest freezer and waited until she could talk.
“I told her she couldn’t take a box,” Dena said to him. “My own cousin. I told her people would talk.”
Leon nodded. “I figured something like that.”
“I was protecting her,” Dena said. “You don’t know what it’s like. To have people know.”
That was when Leon told her.
“Dena,” he said, “I’ve watched you down here a long time. Not just the nine years you’ve run it. The winter of ’09, when Rick got laid off from the foundry, you were down here every Saturday packing boxes.”
“I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
“You never took one home,” Leon said. “Not once. And I knew what your cupboard looked like that winter, because Ellen and I left a quarter of beef in your deep freeze in January. You never said a word about it, and we never asked you to.”
Dena told me she could not breathe when he said that. For seventeen years, she had thought it was Rick’s brother who left that beef.