The Recipe Box That Came Home

The box

The box came on Friday. Priority Mail, a flat-rate box, sent from a post office in west Omaha.

I know because I am the one who carried it. It came through our post office and I sorted it myself onto my own route.

There was no note on the outside. Inside, the cards were all there, stacked in the gray rooster box, in the same order Mom kept them, alphabetical by the first word, with her old cardboard tabs still in place. Rhonda had packed them carefully in bubble wrap.

There was no note on the inside either. Just the cards. And in the R section, behind the tab, between Raisin Pie and Rhubarb Crisp, a gap where the rolls used to be.

You could see where the other cards had leaned into the empty space.

I drove the box straight to Prairie View that afternoon after my route.

Mom was in her recliner by the window with the television on mute, watching the water tower, which is something she does now that I have not quite gotten used to.

“What have you got there,” she said when she saw the rooster on the lid. Her whole face changed. “Oh. Oh, you brought my box. Did Rhonda finish her scanning?”

I set it in her lap. I sat on the edge of her bed. And I told her all of it, the way I had told Mark.

I did not dress it up and I did not make Rhonda sound worse than she was. I told her the listings, the shop, the price, the phone call, and what I had done.

Mom did not say anything for a long time. She opened the lid with the heel of her hand, because she cannot work the latch anymore, and she started going through the cards.

One at a time. She pushed each one forward with the side of her thumb.

She was not reading them, exactly. She was visiting them.

Every so often she would stop and touch one, and once she laughed out loud, at a card for Grandma’s mincemeat that had a note on it in her own hand that said Do not make again, Walt hated it.

When she got to the R tab, her thumb stopped. She felt for the rolls and they were not there.

She looked at the gap for a long time, and her mouth got very small and tight, the way it used to when Dad came home late from the sale barn.

What Mom said

“Where are my rolls,” she said. Not loud. She knew already. I had told her. But I think she had to see the empty space before it was real.

“Somebody in Ohio has them,” I said. “They sold before Abby found the shop. I’m sorry, Mom. I couldn’t get that one.”

She was quiet. Out in the hall, a cart went by with the supper trays, and somebody’s television was playing the Wheel too loud, and the smell of the meatloaf came under the door.

Mom kept her thumb in the empty slot like she was holding a place in a hymnal.

“Your sister doesn’t sell things,” she finally said. “She never has. She kept her prom dress for thirty years. She still has the Christmas candle her Sunday school teacher gave her in 1983. Rhonda doesn’t sell things unless she’s scared.”

I had not thought about it that way. I had spent three days angry, and quiet about it, and I had not once stopped to ask what would make my sister do a thing like that.

Mom had figured it out in about four minutes, sitting in a recliner.

“Is something wrong at home with her?” Mom asked me. “With Jeff? With the boys?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And that was the true answer, and it shamed me a little. I talk to my sister every couple of weeks. I did not know.

Mom closed the lid of the box, slowly, with the heel of her hand.

Then she looked at me with her old look, the one she used to give us from the front pew when we were whispering during the sermon.

“Tina,” she said, “I want to go to church on Sunday. It’s the harvest potluck, isn’t it? I want you to take me. And I want you to bake my rolls.”

“Mom, I don’t have the card. That’s the one that’s gone.”

“You have that telephone,” she said, and pointed at it. “You told me they put a picture of every card on the computer. So you have a picture of my rolls. Bake them off the picture. And bring my box.”