The Kolaches That Sold Out Before Hers

Rose turned back to me. Her eyes were wet, and her chin was set the way it gets, and I could see how hard this was for her.

She was eighty-six years old, standing in the middle of Main Street, and she was about to tell a story she had not told in a very long time.

“I was a Bohemian girl from out past Howells,” she said. “My people were dirt farmers. When I married Joe Novak, his mother thought he married beneath him, and she let me know it every day for twelve years. I asked her for the kolache recipe the week of my wedding, the same as you asked me.”

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said it was for Novak blood,” Rose said.

Nobody said anything. The polka band finished the song, and people clapped under the big tent, and somewhere a little kid was crying for a snow cone.

“So I went to the church kitchen,” Rose said. “Agnes’s mother was too busy to bother with me. But this one,” she nodded at Agnes, “this little skinny thing, showed me how to press the well with two fingers so you don’t go through the bottom.”

“I learned them down there,” Rose said. I never told Joe’s mother. She finally gave me the card in 1970, and I pretended I’d never made a kolache in my life.”

“Twelve years,” I said.

“Twelve years,” Rose said. “And when Pat married Bill, I made her wait nine, and I thought I was being generous.”

“And when you asked me,” she stopped, and pressed her lips together, “I said exactly what that woman said to me. I heard it coming out of my mouth. And I didn’t stop it. I thought that was how it was done. I thought that was how you made sure a girl was going to stay.”

She looked at the four trays still sitting on her own table, forty feet away.

“I was wrong,” she said. “I was wrong to Pat, and I was wrong to you. And I’ve known it since about the third Saturday you came home with flour on your shoes, because I’m not blind, and that boy’s truck is not hard to spot in a church parking lot.”

Then she opened her pocketbook and took out a recipe card.

It was an old three-by-five card, soft at the corners, written in blue ink in her careful, slanted Catholic school handwriting. Kolaches. Novak. Scald 2 cups milk. And at the very bottom, in the same blue ink: For Brittany. Welcome to the family. Rose.

The date written under it was our wedding date.

I looked up at her.

“I wrote it the night before your wedding,” she said. “It’s been in my Bible for a year. I was going to give it to you. Someday. When I decided you’d waited long enough.” She shook her head. “Who was I to decide that.”

I came around the table. I do not remember deciding to. I just did, and I put my arms around that small old woman in her cardigan, in front of the whole festival, and she held on to me harder than I expected.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said into my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, Grandma,” I said. “I know.”

When I let her go, Agnes was wiping her eyes on her apron, and Dorothy was blowing her nose, and Pat was standing at the edge of the tent with both hands over her mouth.