The Kolaches That Sold Out Before Hers

She had been rubbing her knuckles between batches. I had noticed it for weeks.

That morning she could not get the lid off the jar of poppy seed, and she set it down on the table and looked at it like it had insulted her.

“Here,” I said, and opened it. Then, because I am a nurse and could not help myself, I said, “Agnes, let me see.”

She held out her hands. They were small and spotted, and the joints were swollen and shiny the way they get with arthritis that has been going a long time.

Her right thumb did not want to bend. I held them for a minute in mine, the way I hold my patients’ hands at three in the morning when they cannot sleep.

“Do you take anything for these?” I asked.

“Aspirin,” she said. “And bag balm.”

“Bag balm,” I said.

“It’s good for cows,” she said. “I figure it’s good for me.”

I laughed, and she laughed, and then she did not pull her hands away. We sat there for a minute at the end of the steel table, with the radio playing and the oven ticking.

“My mother’s hands got like this,” she said quietly. “At the end she couldn’t roll the dough anymore. She’d sit right there,” and she nodded at a metal stool in the corner, “and tell me what I was doing wrong. Every week. I’d give anything to hear her tell me I was doing it wrong one more time.”

I did not say anything. I just kept holding her hands. After a while she squeezed mine back, once, and said, “All right. Enough of that. The dough’s not going to roll itself.”

The next week I brought her a jar of the good arthritis cream from the pharmacy in Columbus, and some warm wax mitts that I had used for my own mother.

She told me I was wasting my money. She wore the mitts every Saturday after that, between batches, with her hands propped up on a dish towel like a queen.

By spring I was not scared of sticky anymore. My dough came out soft and shiny and stuck to my fingers, and I let it. My wells were even.

My apricot filling was tart enough to make your jaw ache. I could roll the balls almost as fast as Agnes, though she said I still rolled them like a Lutheran.

By summer the old ladies had stopped watching my hands. That was how I knew. Nobody said, “Good job.” Dorothy just quit pinching my dough balls to check them, and Marlene started handing me the posypka bowl without looking up.

And every Saturday, I came home with flour on my shoes.

It was the same white flour, ground into the stitching of my old tennis shoes, and after a few months it would not come out no matter how many times I knocked them against the porch step.

Adam said I was tracking the church all over his kitchen floor.

“It’s Agnes’s flour,” I told him. “Leave it.”

He did. He started doing something else, too, without my ever asking him to.

Every few weeks, a fifty-pound sack of flour would show up in the back of his pickup, and he would carry it down those gray stairs on his shoulder on his way to the elevator Saturday morning.

He would set it in the pantry, tip his cap to Agnes, and leave.