The Recipe Box That Came Back
“I did.”
“I’m on my kitchen floor,” Jodi said. “I’ve been on my kitchen floor since ten o’clock. I’ve got a mixing bowl and a pile of flour and I am trying to make her noodles from memory. I was going to call you for the card. I couldn’t. Do you know how many batches I’ve thrown out?”
“How many?”
“It’s soup, Marlene. Every time. It’s soup.”
And then both of us were crying, the way you cry when you have been holding something up with your arms for four years and somebody takes the other end.
I told her about Calvin. I told her all of it, in the wrong order. The porch, the three dollars, the mail route, the baler. I read her the card down the phone, and I had to stop twice, and when I got to the line about the coffee, she made a noise between a sob and a snort.
“He counted,” she said.
“He counted.”
“There were sixty-one?”
“I counted again after him. Sixty-one.”
“Which one am I on?” she said quietly. “On the noodles.”
“J cuts.”
“I always cut.” She was crying again. “She’d let me use the good knife.”
“I was always the one stirring the broth. I thought it was because I couldn’t be trusted with a knife.”
“You couldn’t,” Jodi said, and we both laughed again, wet and helpless, and then we stopped. The clock ticked in her kitchen.
“I said an unforgivable thing at Christmas,” she said.
“So did I.”
“Mine came first.”
“Mine was worse.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “Jodi, I told you not to come back, and then I sat in that room every Thursday counting the Sundays you hadn’t been there. You came every month. I counted the ones you left early.”
“I left early because I couldn’t stand to see you win.”
“Win what?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed, shakily. “That’s the whole trouble, isn’t it? I don’t know what.”
Neither of us said anything for a time. It was all right. It was the first silence in four years that did not have a wall in it.
“Come Saturday,” I said.
“I’ll come tomorrow.”
“It’s five hours.”
“I know how far it is. I’ve driven it forty-eight times.” She sniffled. “Marlene. I’ll bring the flour.”
“I have flour.”
“I’ll bring my own,” she said. “I want to cut.”
She was in my driveway at ten the next morning. I had been up since five.
I watched through the front window as she got out of her little blue Honda, and I saw that she had gone gray and kept it, and that she had put on weight in the hips, and that she walked like our mother when she was thinking, with her chin up and her purse held in front. I wondered when exactly we had both gotten old. I had not been paying attention.
I opened the door before she knocked.
We stood on the porch. We were awkward as girls at a school dance. Then Jodi said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and put both arms around me and held on, her cheek against my shoulder, a grocery bag swinging against my back. She smelled like the car and like Jergens lotion, which was the lotion our mother kept by every sink.