The Recipe Box That Came Home

The phone call

I called Rhonda from the kitchen table. Abby went upstairs, which I appreciated. She is a kind girl, and she knew this was not a conversation for an audience, even an audience of one.

Rhonda answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a television behind her, and a dishwasher running. It was a quarter after five on a Tuesday, an ordinary time in an ordinary house.

“Hey, Tina,” she said. “What’s up? Is Mom okay?”

“Mom’s fine,” I said. “Rhonda, Abby found Mom’s recipe cards on Etsy. Two hundred of them. Twelve dollars each. The rolls already sold to somebody in Ohio.”

There was a long pause. The dishwasher on her end changed cycles.

I heard her walk into another room and close a door, and when she came back on, her voice was flat and careful, the way it gets when she has rehearsed something.

“Tina, they’re just cards,” she said. “Mom can’t hold a pencil. She can’t hold a spoon. Nobody is cooking from those cards. They were going to sit in a box in somebody’s basement for thirty years.”

“They’re Mom’s,” I said. “They’re in her handwriting. Some of them are in Grandma’s handwriting. You told me you were going to scan them.”

“I did scan them,” she said, and I believe that part was true. “I’ve got every one of them on a thumb drive. You can have a copy. The words aren’t going anywhere.”

“Take the shop down, Rhonda. Tonight.”

“I can’t just take it down. I already paid the listing fees. Look, I have to go, Jeff’s home. We’ll talk about this when you’re not so worked up.”

I was not worked up. I had not raised my voice once.

I am a rural mail carrier; I have had men stand in their driveways and yell at me about their seed catalogs, and I do not raise my voice. But she said it, and then she hung up.

I sat there with the phone in my hand. Then I opened the shop again and refreshed it. The listings were all still there.

Nothing had changed except that the little number at the top had gone up. Someone, somewhere, had just favorited Mom’s kolaches.

Why I did not call anyone else

People have asked me since why I didn’t do any of the sensible things. Why I didn’t call Mom and tell her.

Why I didn’t call Etsy and report it. Why I didn’t drive to Omaha that night and stand on Rhonda’s porch.

The answer to the first one is easy. Mom had been at Prairie View for three weeks and three days.

The nurse on the evening shift had told me privately that Mom was still crying herself to sleep. She would not have said so to me.

My mother had already lost her house, her kitchen and her husband’s side of the bed in one month.

I was not going to call her up and tell her that her older daughter had sold her handwriting to strangers at twelve dollars a card.

As for Etsy, I did look it up. There is a way to report a shop.

But I would have been reporting my own sister, and it would have taken days or weeks to sort out, and by then Mom’s cards would be scattered across forty states in other people’s picture frames.

At 9:40 that night, I refreshed the page for maybe the thirtieth time, and under Mom’s sour cream raisin pie, a little red line had appeared: In 3 people’s carts. Three strangers were thinking about it.

That pie was the one she made every year for the Fourth of July.

My dad used to eat it standing at the counter, with his fork, straight out of the tin, and she would swat him with the dish towel and he would keep eating.