The Recipe Box That Came Back
Nothing was for one girl. Not a single card, in two hundred and eleven. Calvin had counted right.
The noodle card was near the front of the Suppers, and it was the oldest in the box, and the ink had gone brown. I knew it before I turned it over. I had made those noodles beside her on a stool, with a dish towel for an apron, when my chin came to the edge of the table.
Egg noodles, the way her mother made them: a mound of flour with a well in the middle, four eggs, a pinch of salt, a little water at a time. Work it. Roll it thin enough to read a hymnal through. Let it dry on a clean dish towel. Cut. Drop into broth.
In the corner, the letters. M stirs. J cuts.
And at the bottom, almost too small to see, in pencil, a reference I had not noticed since I was a girl: Psalm 133.
I knew it without looking it up. We had said it at the reunion every year, my mother in her good apron at the head of the table, a hundred relatives eating noodles on folding tables. Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.
She had written it at the bottom of the card for the dish that took two sets of hands.
My mother was not a woman who left riddles. She wrote down what she wanted the way she wrote down everything, on a card, in the corner.
“Dean,” I said.
“Yes, honey.”
“Where’s my phone?”
I had to say the first sentence three times before I could dial. I walked out to the garden gate first and stood there with my hand on the latch.
I thought: Lord, I don’t know how to do this. And I think I said it out loud, which is not like me. I am not a woman who prays in the yard. I pray in church and over meals and, lately, at three in the morning with my face in the pillow. But I stood at the gate in my stocking feet and said, You’ll have to do the talking. I’ll do the dialing.
It rang five times.
“Marlene?”
Her voice was careful. It was the voice you use for a doctor’s office calling on a Saturday.
“Jodi,” I said. “Everything is all right. Nobody’s hurt.”
“Okay.” I heard her breathe out.
“I found Mom’s box.”
There was a silence. I could hear a clock somewhere in her house, and a radio low in the background, the way she always kept one going.
“You found it,” she said slowly. “I thought you had it. I thought you were just… I thought you didn’t want to say.”
“I didn’t have it,” I said. “I gave it away. Jodi, I’m sorry. Dean packed it with the kitchen things and I said all of it and I didn’t look, and it went to the Methodist shop and somebody bought it. I’ve known for most of a month and I couldn’t make myself call you. I’m so sorry.”
I waited for the voice I deserved.
Instead I heard a sound I could not at first identify. It started low and broke open.
My sister was laughing.
“You gave it to the Methodists,” she said, with her breath gone. “Oh, Marlene. You gave Mom’s box to the Methodists.”