The Recipe Box That Came Back
I want to be honest about the second Saturday. I had been at it eleven hours. I had gone through a bedroom closet that still smelled like her. I had found my father’s reading glasses in a coat pocket, years after we thought we had boxed up every last thing of his. I was not entirely in my right mind.
Dean was taking down the kitchen shelves while I was in the hall closet, and he called out, “All this kitchen stuff, you want to keep any of it?”
“All of it goes,” I said. I did not turn around. I had said that sentence about forty times that day. It had stopped being a sentence and become a kind of breathing.
He is a careful man, my husband. He did not go through a woman’s mother’s shelf one object at a time because she was grieving. He took her at her word. He packed the cookbooks and the Pyrex and the good rolling pin and a coffee can of wooden spoons into the third carton marked Kitchen, and the walnut box went in on top, and Marge’s husband carried all eleven cartons out to the truck by five o’clock.
I found out eleven days later, on a Wednesday. I went to the cupboard in my own kitchen to put away the one thing I had kept, my mother’s blue sugar bowl, and I thought: I will put the recipe box beside it. I will tell Jodi it is safe.
I stood very still in the middle of the kitchen.
Dean found me there. He did not ask what was wrong. He went white when I told him, and then he put on his coat.
We were at Marge’s shop in eleven minutes. Marge wept before I had finished the sentence. The cartons had been sorted the Monday after by the Tuesday ladies and put out on the shelves, and the sale had run the Saturday before. Cash, no receipts, a dollar here, a dollar there. She went through her price book. She called everyone she could think of who had been in.
“I’ll find it, hon,” she said. “I promise you I’ll find it.”
She did not find it. For weeks I told myself she might.
I could have called my sister. Anyone would say I should have, and I would agree with them. I had a phone. I had her number. But think what the call would have been. Hello, Jodi. The one thing of Mom’s you asked me for, the one time you asked me for anything, I gave away with a box of Pyrex, and I did it because I could not stand to look at it. After the Christmas I had put us through. After the parking lot.
I could not do it. I would sooner have walked the five hours.
On the first of September Jodi texted again. Any word on the box? No hurry.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I turned the phone face down on the counter and went and weeded a flower bed that did not need it.
“Mrs. Teague,” Calvin Stoddard said again, on my porch, gently. “Marlene. I’d like to say a couple of things and then I’ll get out of your way.”
“Please come in. Dean will make coffee.”