The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
So it was just Ashley and me in the vegetable aisle, between the tomatoes and the nearly empty shelf where the soup was supposed to be.
“I threw away a hundred and forty jars,” Ashley said. “And these people had three cans of corn.”
“You didn’t know that,” I said.
“I didn’t ask,” she said. “That’s worse. I didn’t ask you anything. I read it at two in the morning and I didn’t ask you one thing.”
She told me then about the stories she had read. A man in another state who got botulism from home-canned green beans his aunt gave him.
A whole church potluck somewhere out West that got sick from home-canned potatoes. She had read every one of them, she said, more than once.
“They were real,” she said. “Those people almost died.”
“They were real,” I said. “I believe every one of them. And I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts every one of those beans was put up in a water bath, the way my mother did hers.”
Then I told her about my mother’s beans. About carrying them out of the cellar in 1994 and pouring them out behind the hog house, and my mother not speaking to me for a week.
Ashley stared at me. “You did the same thing I did.”
“I did,” I said. “Except I was right, and I was still wrong about how I did it. I never asked my mother either. I just decided. So I’ve been where you are, honey, standing on both sides of it.”
She started crying then, in the middle of the food shelf, in her green apron. Not loud. She just stood there with the tears running and her chin going, still holding my jar of beans.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Marlene. I knew it was wrong when I was doing it. I was throwing them in the dumpster and I could see your writing on the lids and I kept going.”
“I know,” I said.
“I couldn’t stop,” she said. “Since Kayla’s baby, I can’t stop. I read one thing and then another thing, and I’m so scared something is going to happen to Henry or Ava and it’ll be because I didn’t read enough.”
I took the jar out of her hands and set it on the shelf. Then I took her hands, the way she had taken mine in that hallway in Iowa City.
“Honey,” I said. “I sat in that hallway with you. I know where all this comes from. I was mad at you for about a week. I’m not anymore.”
I want to tell the next part plainly, because people sometimes think a story like this ends with a hug and everything is fixed. It did not end there, and I do not think it should have.
Ashley went up to the front table and asked Barb how many families had come through the week before. Barb told her. Then Ashley asked Barb if she could see the sign-in book, and Barb showed her.
There were names in it Ashley knew. A girl she went to high school with. A man from our church who had lost his job at the creamery.
A young hygienist from the dental office where Ashley works, who sits two chairs down from her every day.