The Kolaches That Sold Out Before Hers

I smiled and danced the dollar dance and cut the cake, and the whole time there was a little stone sitting in my chest that said, you are not family. Not really. Not yet.

His mother found me by the cake table around ten o’clock, while Adam was outside helping his uncle jump a pickup with a dead battery. Pat is a small, quick woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she does not waste words.

“I saw your face,” she said. “What did she say to you?”

I told her. Pat closed her eyes and let out a breath through her nose, and then she laughed, just a little, not at me.

“She made me wait nine years,” she whispered. “Nine. I got that card the year Adam started kindergarten. Don’t take it personal, honey. It’s not about you. It’s about her.”

“Nine years,” I said.

“And she was easy on me,” Pat said. “Ask her sometime how long she waited. She won’t tell you. But it was longer.”

I thought about that the whole drive to the motel in Columbus. Adam was quiet behind the wheel, both hands on it, the way he drives when he is upset.

Finally, at the stop sign where the county road meets the highway, he said what he had been holding in.

“I’m going to talk to her,” he said. “Tomorrow. She can’t say that to my wife.”

“Please don’t,” I said.

“Brit.”

“I mean it. If you go over there and make her give it to me, then I have a recipe card that I got because my husband yelled at his grandma. Every time I make them I’ll know that. And so will she.”

He did not say anything for a mile or two. The headlights went up and down over the hills, and a deer stood in the ditch and watched us go by.

“So what do you want to do,” he said.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I don’t want to ask her again. And I don’t want you to ask for me.”

People have asked me since why I did not just try again. Bring her flowers, sit with her on a Sunday, ask nicely a second time.

And the honest answer is that I could have. Maybe she would have softened in a year or two. Pat thought she might.

But I did not want it handed to me because I nagged, or because Adam fought her for it, or because she felt sorry for me.

I wanted to earn it. I wanted to stand in front of that old woman someday knowing my hands could do what hers did.

I did not know yet how I was going to do that. I found out a week later, at Mass.

The bulletin that Sunday had a little box in the bottom corner that I almost did not read. Altar Society baking, Saturdays, 6 a.m., church kitchen.

All welcome. Proceeds to the roof fund. Underneath it somebody had typed, in smaller letters, Bring your own apron.

I work nights at the hospital in Columbus, three twelves a week, and my schedule that year had me off Friday and Saturday nights. So Saturday mornings were mine. Usually I slept in them.

The next Saturday I set an alarm for five fifteen. Adam rolled over and asked if somebody was dying. I told him no, I was going to church.

He lifted his head off the pillow and looked at me like I had said I was joining the circus.