The Kolaches That Sold Out Before Hers

That was the part I did not like. I want to say that honestly. I did not like it at all.

By eleven forty, my trays were empty. All forty dozen. Agnes counted the cigar box twice and said six hundred and twelve dollars, and Kathy wrote it on the back of her bulletin and underlined it three times.

Down the row, Rose still had four trays on her table under plastic wrap.

People noticed. In a town of nine hundred, you notice when the table that has sold out first for forty years still has four trays at noon.

I saw two women from the Altar Society stop at the face painting and look from my empty table to Rose’s full one and then lean their heads together.

I did not say a word. I did not need to, and I did not want to. I busied myself folding the empty bakery boxes flat and stacking them under the table.

But I had saved one. I had saved it back at nine o’clock that morning, before the line got long.

One apricot kolache, the best-looking one on the first tray, on a paper napkin under a coffee can lid at the back of the table. I had not told anybody who it was for. I am not sure I had told myself.

The ladies were in a good mood.

Agnes was telling them about my first batch, the flat ones, the ones she ate anyway, and acting out the face Jean had made, and Dorothy was laughing so hard she had to sit down on a cooler.

Agnes had to set the cigar box down on the table to keep from dropping it.

That was when I saw Rose coming.

She came slowly, the way she walks now, a little bent, in her blue cardigan and her kerchief, with her pocketbook over her arm.

The polka band behind her was playing the Beer Barrel Polka, the same one they had played at our wedding. People stepped aside to let her by.

She stopped in front of my empty table and looked down at the trays. Nothing on them but crumbs and a little smear of apricot.

I lifted the coffee can lid. I picked up the last kolache on its napkin and held it out to her across the table.

Rose looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at me. Then, very carefully, she took it.

She broke off a piece with her fingers and put it in her mouth, and she chewed it slowly, looking at the trays, not at me. The ladies had stopped laughing. Agnes was standing very still with one hand on the cigar box.

Rose swallowed.

“Too much lemon in mine,” she said finally. “I always thought so. My mother-in-law put it in. I never had the nerve to take it out.”

I did not know what to say. So I did not say anything.

Rose set the rest of the kolache down on its napkin. She looked at Agnes, and something passed between them that I did not understand yet.

“Agnes taught you,” Rose said to me.

“Every Saturday,” I said. “For a year.”

Rose nodded slowly. “She taught me too,” she said. “In 1958.”

Agnes made a small sound, like a laugh that got caught.

“You were thirteen,” Rose said to her. “Standing on a milk crate next to your mother at that same table.”

“You were eighteen,” Agnes said. “And you came down those stairs crying so hard I thought somebody died.”