The Kolaches That Sold Out Before Hers

Poppy seed went through an old hand grinder clamped to the table, then into a pan with milk and sugar and a little butter, and cooked down until it was thick and black and smelled like Christmas Eve.

Then came the shaping. Agnes pinched off balls of dough and rolled them under her palm on the table so fast that her hand was a blur, and set them in rows on greased sheet pans, twenty-four to a pan.

They rose again under the towels. Then, with two fingers, she pressed a well into the middle of each one, and Kathy came behind her with a spoon and filled them.

Last of all, Marlene sprinkled the crumb topping, flour and sugar and butter rubbed together with her fingertips. Marlene called it posypka. She said her grandmother would come back from the grave if anybody called it streusel in that kitchen.

They baked at three seventy-five for about fourteen minutes, until the edges were gold. When the first pans came out, Agnes brushed the tops with melted butter, picked up one apricot kolache with her bare fingers, and handed it to me.

“Now you know what it’s supposed to taste like,” she said. “So you know when yours is wrong.”

I bit into it, and I almost cried. It was soft as a cloud and just barely sweet, and the apricot was tart enough to make the back of my jaw ache.

It tasted like Rose’s. Not exactly. But close enough that I had to look out the little window for a minute at somebody’s feet going by.

The second Saturday, Agnes let me roll balls. Mine were lumpy and too big, and she pinched pieces off of them and stuck the pieces back on the big ball of dough without a word.

The third Saturday she let me press the wells. I pressed too hard and went right through the bottom of four of them.

The fourth Saturday she let me make a batch of dough from scratch, start to finish, with her standing at my elbow.

I added the flour the way I would have added it to bread, cup after cup, because that is what my mother taught me.

My kolaches came out flat as pancakes. They were tough on the bottom and dry in the middle, and the filling sat on top like a puddle on a parking lot. Jean looked at them and very kindly said nothing at all.

Agnes picked one up and ate it anyway. She ate the whole thing, standing there with her hand under it to catch the crumbs, chewing slowly, looking at the ceiling like she was tasting a wine.

“Too much flour,” she said finally. “You’re scared of sticky.”

“It was sticking to everything,” I said.

“It’s supposed to,” she said. “Good dough is soft. Soft is scary. You’ll get over it.”

She threw the rest of my batch in the bucket for Kathy’s chickens and started me over again from the milk.

That was the fall. Then it was winter, and the Saturday baking moved to every other week after Christmas, because nobody buys kolaches in a blizzard.

Agnes said I could take the off weeks, but I came anyway. Sometimes it was just the two of us in that warm basement with the snow piled up against the little window.

One Saturday in February, when her hands were bad, Agnes told me about her hands.