The Recipe Box That Came Back
I won’t pretend to remember how it started. That is the shameful part of an old fight: the first insult goes soft in the memory and the hundredth is still sharp. I can tell you where we were. We were in Mom’s kitchen the Christmas after she fell, with the ham going cold, and Mom was upstairs sleeping off the pills they had given her at the hospital. Jodi said I had made myself the only daughter our mother had. She said it quietly, which is why it landed.
I said, “Then don’t come back until you’ve earned the other one.”
That was the last thing I said to my sister for a long while.
She came back, of course. Jodi drove up the first Sunday of every month, because she loved our mother, and she was careful to leave before three o’clock, because I came at three. Mom moved into the Care Center that fall. She had a room with a window on the parking lot and a bulletin board where the aides pinned her cards. The aides told me, because aides tell everything, that Mom had worked it out within a month. She would say to Jodi on the first Sunday, “Marlene’s doing fine, she was by Thursday.” And to me on Thursday, “Jodi looked tired, she was by Sunday.” She carried each of us to the other a little at a time, like water in cupped hands, for three years.
The last Christmas, Mom asked the two of us to sit at one table. She did not make it a speech. She said, “I’d take a card table.” We sat at the long table in the Care Center dining room at opposite ends with eleven other people between us, and Mom looked down the whole length of it and smiled at both of us as if it were fine.
She died in July, on a Tuesday, at ten past four in the afternoon. We were both in the room. Jodi stood on one side of the bed and I stood on the other and we held a hand each. I want that on the record. We did that much together.
After the funeral dinner Jodi said, “Is there anything of Mom’s you need me to take?”
“Take what you want,” I said.
She looked at me a long moment. Then she said, “No. You have it,” and went back to her car. She was not being hateful. I think she was being tired. I stood in the church parking lot and watched her turn onto the county road and I did not lift my hand.
Two weeks later, on the second of August, a text came in. I still have it. It said: Whenever you get to the kitchen, would you set aside Mom’s recipe box for me? No hurry. Just that.
I wrote back: Of course.
Two words. I meant them when I typed them.
The house had to be empty by the end of August. The buyers were a young couple from Des Moines who wanted the porch swing and said the word “character” a lot. Dean and I took two Saturdays. The women from the Ladies Aid brought sandwiches and a case of boxes from the grocery, and Marge, who runs the Methodist thrift shop on Saturdays, sent over her husband’s pickup.