The Recipe Box That Came Home
What Mark said
My husband, Mark, runs the scale at the co-op elevator, and in October that means he leaves before daylight and comes home after dark.
That night he was still out there with a line of grain trucks backed up to the highway.
I called him anyway. He answered on the first ring, because I never call him at the elevator unless something is wrong, and he knows it.
I could hear an auger running behind him and a truck engine idling.
I told him the whole thing, start to finish. Abby in the doorway. The rolls sold to Ohio. The phone call. They’re just cards.
The pie in three people’s carts. Mark did not say one word the whole time. He just listened, the way he does.
When I finished, he was quiet a second. Then he said, “Buy them. All of them.”
“Mark, it’s over two thousand dollars.”
“Then the truck waits till spring,” he said. His pickup has needed a new transmission since July.
He had been saving for it out of every paycheck, a little at a time, and he knew exactly how much was in that envelope. “Tina. Buy them. I’ll be home by midnight.”
I said, “Okay.” Then I said, “Thank you.” And he said, “Those are your mom’s,” like that settled everything, and to be honest, it did.
One hundred and ninety-nine
I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and started at the top of the shop. You cannot buy a whole shop at once.
You have to open each listing, one at a time, and click the button, and wait for the page.
Abby came down around ten in her pajamas and sat beside me without being asked.
She read the names of the cards out loud as I added them, the way her grandma used to read off grocery lists.
“Chicken and noodles,” she read. “Grandma’s angel food. Egg coffee for church, it says one egg per twelve cups. Pickled beets. Funeral potatoes. Ham loaf for Easter. Rice Krispie bars for Bible school.”
Somewhere past the Ms, she put her head on my shoulder and read the next one, and the next one. It took us fifty-three minutes.
I timed it later from the order confirmations, which came into my email one right after another like a stack of bills.
The total was $2,388.00. One hundred and ninety-nine cards at twelve dollars.
Plus a hundred and sixty-seven dollars in Nebraska sales tax, which I did not look at closely until the statement came. I put the whole thing on the Visa.
When the last order went through, the shop page refreshed itself and said: This shop has no items listed right now. Abby and I sat and looked at that sentence for a long time.
Somewhere in Omaha, my sister’s phone was chiming. Etsy sends the seller a notice for every sale, with the buyer’s name and address on it.
One hundred and ninety-nine notices. Every one of them said Tina Vogel, and every one of them had my home address on it.
She did not call. She did not text. Mark came home at ten after twelve smelling like corn dust and diesel, and he looked at the screen over my shoulder, and he kissed the top of my head and went to bed.