The Kolaches That Sold Out Before Hers

Grandma Rose said it at our wedding supper, in the parish hall at St. Wenceslaus, with a plate of her own kolaches sitting in front of her like a little crown.

Apricot, poppy seed and prune, all of them glossy on top and dusted with crumb.

I had been a Novak for about four hours.

I was still in my dress, with my veil pinned up so it would stop catching on folding chairs, and I had finally sat down next to her because Adam told me she would like that.

“Grandma Rose,” I said, “these are the best thing on this whole table. Would you teach me how to make them sometime? I’d love to learn the family recipe.”

She did not look at me right away. She finished stirring her coffee, set the spoon on the saucer, and patted my hand twice, the way you would pat a child who asked if she could drive the tractor.

“It’s for Novak blood, honey,” she said.

That was all. She said it the way she would have told me it might rain Thursday. Then she turned back to her coffee and asked her sister-in-law across the table whether the Kubiceks had finished with their beans yet.

Adam heard. He was on my other side, and I felt him go stiff. He set his fork down and pushed his chair back, and I knew exactly what was about to happen, because I had been dating that man for three years.

I put my hand on his arm. Not hard. Just enough.

He was thirty-five years old, in a rented gray tux with the vest unbuttoned, and he was about to stand up in front of two hundred people and argue with his eighty-six-year-old grandmother at his own wedding.

I was not going to let our marriage start like that.

“Not today,” I said, low. “Please.”

He looked at me for a long second. Then he pulled his chair back in. He picked up his fork.

But he did not eat anything else off that plate, and when his grandmother offered him a second kolache he said no thank you, which for Adam Novak is a declaration of war.

I want to be fair to Rose from the start, because she is not the villain of anybody’s life, and she is certainly not the villain of mine.

She was eighty-six. She had buried a husband and a son. She had fed this parish for sixty years with those hands.

Our town has about nine hundred people in it, sitting in the rolling hills of east-central Nebraska, with a grain elevator, a bank, two bars, a Catholic church with a steeple you can see from four miles off, and a Sokol hall where the old men still play cards on Tuesday nights.

Half the mailboxes on the county roads have Czech names on them. Novak, Svoboda, Kubicek, Hajek.

Every September the town puts up white tents and a polka stage for the fall festival, and every year since before I was born, Rose Novak has had the kolache table under the first tent.

I was not from there. I grew up in Grand Island, a Lutheran girl with a German last name, and the first time Adam took me home to meet his family I thought a kolache was a kind of donut.

I said so out loud, at his mother’s kitchen table. Adam still tells that story at Christmas.

Still, it stung. I am not going to pretend it did not.