The Recipe Box That Came Back
Your mother put two letters in the corner of nearly every one. M and J. On the noodles: M stirs, J cuts. On the cinnamon rolls: double batch, J takes half home. On the hash brown casserole: both girls will fight for the corners. I counted sixty-one cards like that. There is not one in the box for a single daughter.
I carried the mail on Route Two for twenty-eight years. You learn who is not speaking by whose box stops getting the Christmas cards.
I turned it over. The back began lower down, as if he had needed a minute.
My brother Floyd and I did not speak for nineteen years over a hay baler. He died in March. I have the baler. It does not make noodles.
I do not know what happened between your girls and I am not asking. I know a mother who wrote two letters sixty-one times was cooking for two.
You need a reason to call. Here is one. Tell her the box is home.
Calvin Stoddard, 412 Mill Street. The porch light is always on. The coffee is bad.
I read it three times. The third time I was not reading the words so much as the corner of a card I had held every Sunday of my childhood.
I do not know how long I sat there. I know the coffee Dean had set by my knee went cold, because when I finally reached for it, it was the temperature of the step.
“Is it bad?” Dean asked. He had come back out and was standing a step above me, not touching me.
“No,” I said. I held the card up over my shoulder and he took it from me. I heard him read. I heard him stop in the middle and start again.
“Well,” he said at last, very quietly. “That man.”
“Yes.”
“He drove a month with that in his kitchen.”
“He wrote it six times,” I said, and then I was crying in the plain, ugly way I had been trying not to for three months, with my glasses in my hand and the box on my knees and my husband’s hand finally on my shoulder.
When I could, I opened the box on the top step and started at the front.
My mother filed by dish, not by name. Breads, then Breakfast, then Cakes, then Church Suppers, with felt-tipped dividers my father had cut from an old shirt box. I took out the first card I found, a cinnamon roll card in her slanting blue Palmer cursive, soft as flannel with forty years of flour. And there in the upper right corner, small, the way she’d write a grocery tally, were two letters. J. M.
I had looked at that card a hundred times. I had never once seen it.
I went through the whole box on the porch step, one card at a time, until Dean quietly brought out a cushion and a sweater and the afternoon went orange. The corner letters were everywhere. She had used them the way other women use stars. Pie crust: J has the cool hands. Rhubarb custard: M won’t eat it, make a small one. Relish tray: both. Sloppy Joes: Jodi no onions, Marlene extra. The raisin bread card said only, J. Always J. And under it, as if she had anticipated my sister’s ear: M makes the glaze.