The Recipe Box My Mother in Law Left Me

The winter Evan had pneumonia, she drove over in a snowstorm with a pot of chicken soup and left it on the porch rather than come in and be in the way.

When Harold’s brother died, I sat with her at the visitation and she let me hold her purse.

When I had my first knee surgery, a pan of her scalloped potatoes appeared in my refrigerator and no one admitted to putting it there.

She taught Evan to drive a tractor at eleven, sitting on the fender with her arms crossed, and she never once raised her voice at him.

But she never said anything kind to my face. If she liked something, she said it was fine. If she liked something very much, she said it was fine and ate two helpings.

Dennis and I ended things two years ago, in March. There was nobody to blame in it. People want someone, so I will say it plainly.

We were two good people who had run out of things to say at supper, and we sat on the edge of the bed one night and agreed we had both known for a long time.

We told Eldora together, at her kitchen table, on a Sunday. She listened with her hands flat on the oilcloth.

When we finished, she was quiet for a long moment, and then she looked at me, only at me, and said, “You’ll still come Sundays.”

I said, “I don’t think so, Eldora.”

She said, “Suit yourself.” And she got up and started clearing plates, and I let myself out.

That was the last real conversation we had on her ground.

She fell that summer, in the yard, going out to the clothesline, and lay there an hour before the mail carrier saw her. After the hospital she went to the Dalton Care Center, and she lived there a little over two years.

I saw her at Evan and Shay’s anniversary dinner, and at one Christmas Eve service, and only twice at the care center.

Shay went more than the rest of us put together. She worked twelve hour shifts as a nurse’s aide at the county home, ten minutes down the road, and she stopped in on Wednesday afternoons on her way home, still in her scrubs, and sat with Eldora and watched the game shows. Evan told me so. Shay never mentioned it.

My second visit was in the first week of December. Eldora was thin and her hair had been set by a girl who did not know how she liked it.

She looked at the cardboard tray of cookies I had brought and said, in a voice with no wind in it, “I would like a piece of that lemon pie of yours. If it’s not a trouble.”