Thirty Suppers With No Charge

No charge

Abby came down the stairs while I was browning the stew meat. She stood in the kitchen doorway sniffing.

“Who’s that for?” she said. “That’s way too much for the three of us, Mom. Are we having company?”

I told her about Aunt Tracy’s wrist. I told her I was going to bring her supper every night until she was better.

I did not tell her about the twelve requests. Abby had been fifteen that spring, and Doug and I had kept it between us.

She thought about it for about two seconds. “I’ll drive them over,” she said, already reaching for the hook where we hang the car keys.

Abby had gotten her license in November. She would have driven to the moon if anyone had let her.

But I looked at her face, and there was more in it than wanting the car keys. She loved her aunt. Tracy had taught her to make pie crust when she was eight.

“On the ice?” I said. “Four miles of blacktop in the dark, with a hot roaster in the front seat?”

“I’ll go slow,” she said. “I’ll go so slow you’ll be embarrassed for me. I’ll buckle the dish in.”

Doug was standing behind her in the doorway. He nodded at me over her head. “She’s a good driver,” he said. “Better than her mother.”

That first night, though, I went along. The stew was ready by five thirty, with a pan of cornbread wrapped in a dish towel. I covered the roaster in foil.

Then I opened the junk drawer and found a pad of white paper, the roll of masking tape and a black marker. I tore off a sheet and wrote two words on it, plain as I could make them.

No charge.

I taped it onto the foil and smoothed the corners down with my thumb. Abby read it over my shoulder.

She looked at me, and she started to ask, and then she decided not to, and she went to warm up the car.

Tracy and Greg live four miles out on the blacktop, in a white house with green shutters and a porch Greg built himself.

The porch light was on. Greg’s propane truck was not in the drive, and I could see the blue glow of the television through the front window.

I carried the roaster up the steps. Abby waited at the bottom of the porch steps with the cornbread in a plastic container. Tracy opened the door in her bathrobe, the pink chenille one, with her right arm in a cast propped against her chest in a sling.

Her hair was flat on one side, and she looked about ten years older than she had at Christmas. “Jill,” she said. She sounded surprised. “You didn’t have to do this. You really didn’t.”

“It’s beef stew,” I said. “And Abby made the cornbread. We’ll be back tomorrow night, and the night after that.”

Then she saw the note. I watched her read it. Two words take no time at all to read, but she stood there a long while looking at them, and her face did something I could not quite name.

She did not say anything about it. She said thank you, very quietly, and she took the cornbread from Abby with her good hand, and I set the roaster on her counter and showed her how to warm it.

When we turned into our own driveway, Abby put the car in park. “Mom,” she said, “what does that mean? The note?”

“It means what it says, honey,” I said. She is smarter than I was at sixteen, and she let it go for then.