The Recipe Box My Mother in Law Left Me

I did what I was told. I cut a second piece of the pie and ate it at the table with the card propped against the sugar bowl.

On Saturday I drove to the library in town, and the girl at the desk showed me how to work the copier, and I made a copy of the top half of the gravy card.

I did not copy the pencil. That was mine. I copied the part above the line, the flour and the drippings and the proportions, in the upright hand of a younger Eldora, and I folded the sheet in thirds and put it in an envelope.

I called Marlene that evening at her house in Cincinnati. We had never been on the phone for longer than it takes to ask who is bringing the ham.

“The box was recipes,” I said. “Two hundred or so. They’re hers, and they’re her mother in law’s too. Your grandmother Birchard’s gravy is in there, with the proportions. I made you a copy. I’d like to give it to you in person.”

She did not say anything for long enough that I checked the phone.

“She wouldn’t let me in the kitchen,” Marlene said. “After I was twelve. She said I’d get it wrong. I make a gravy out of a jar, Connie. I’ve been making it out of a jar for thirty years.”

“Come Sunday,” I said. “I’m having Evan and Shay. I’ll have the noodles.”

“I don’t know if I should,” she said.

“The last card says come Sundays,” I said. “It doesn’t say whose.”

She said she would think about it, which in our family means yes.

Here is the part where I have to tell on myself, because it came back to me on Saturday night at the sink, and I have not been able to put it down since.

Last Thanksgiving was the first one I hosted at my house by myself, after the divorce. I had made the turkey and set the table, and all the family came, Dennis too, and Eldora, whom Marlene drove over from the care center for the afternoon with a walker in the trunk.

Shay had brought a green bean casserole.

She had made it the way she makes it, with the cream of mushroom soup and the crispy onions, and she carried it in with both hands and set it on the sideboard next to my potatoes.

I took the lid off. I looked inside. And I said it.

I said, “Well.”

I did not mean anything by it. My head was in the oven at the time, on the bird, and the word came out of my mouth in her voice, the way it will when you have lived next to a person for thirty years.