The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street

What she said

I waited. I had learned that at the front desk, too. When a child comes to you upset, you do not fill up the quiet. You let them fill it.

“I read all those posts,” Kayla said. “The scary ones. About Halloween, and edibles, and razor blades. I read every one of them, every year. I’m the PTA president. I thought I was supposed to warn people.”

“But that’s not really why,” she said, and her voice broke. “It’s that everybody here loves you, Joanne. Everybody. I’ve lived here three years and I run the book fair and I’m still ‘Josh’s wife.’ At my house on Halloween it’s a bowl of Snickers from Walmart. Last year Owen talked about your popcorn balls for a week.”

“I wanted one thing that was mine,” she said. “One thing my kids would remember about me instead. And I knew how it would read when I wrote it. I did it anyway. That’s the part I can’t stand.”

Lily woke up on her shoulder and blinked at me and said, “Grandma, you have a hat,” in a little croaky voice, and Kayla laughed through her crying and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

I thought about Doug Meyer in his pillowcase in 1986. I thought about a young woman from Des Moines in a town where everybody already had their places, eating store candy at her own kitchen table while her son talked about mine.

The last popcorn ball

The line had cleaned out the tray while Kayla walked. There was one popcorn ball left, in the bottom of the last laundry basket. I had been saving it without knowing I was saving it.

I picked it up, the ribbon a little crushed from the wind, and I held it out across the folding table to Kayla. Not to Lily. To her.

She looked at it, and then at me. “I don’t deserve that,” she said.

“It isn’t about deserving,” I said. “It’s popcorn and syrup.” Then I reached into my cardigan pocket and took out the other thing I had been carrying all night without knowing why.

It was my mother’s recipe card, the one with the grease spot shaped like Ohio. It was soft as cloth from sixty years in kitchen drawers. Her handwriting said “Popcorn Balls, Mother’s,” and under it, in my handwriting from 1985, “double for Elm St.”

I put it in Kayla’s other hand. She looked down at it and read it, and I watched her understand what it was.

“Joanne, I can’t take this,” she said. “This is your mother’s.”

“I’m not giving it to you,” I said. “I’m lending it to you. I need somebody to help me next year. It takes two days and three hundred of them about killed me. My hands aren’t what they used to be.”

“Come make them with me,” I said. “Bring the kids. Owen can do the ribbon. You can do the labels. You’re better at that kind of thing than I am.”

Kayla stood there in the dark at the end of my driveway with her daughter on her hip, a popcorn ball in one hand and my mother’s recipe card in the other, and she cried the way you cry when you have been holding something for three years.

Josh put his arm around her. Owen, who had popcorn and syrup all over the front of his dinosaur, looked up at the three of us and said, “Why is everybody crying? It’s Halloween.”

“Because Grandma’s popcorn balls are really good,” Kayla said, and that was the first time I ever heard her call me Grandma.