Thirty Suppers With No Charge

Clear

Day fourteen was a Wednesday, and Abby’s night to go alone. She came home later than usual, and quiet.

She hung up her coat and came into the kitchen, where I was writing out the grocery list for the next week, and sat down across from me.

“Aunt Tracy cried tonight,” she said. I put the pen down on the list and waited, because I could tell there was more.

“Not at me. After. I was doing the dishes and she was sitting at the table with the note. She’d peeled the tape off the foil, and she had the paper folded small in her good hand, and she was just crying, really quiet. She didn’t think I could see.”

“Mom,” she said, “are you being mean to her?” Her voice was not angry. It was careful, the way you ask a question you are afraid of the answer to.

It was a fair question. She had watched me tape those notes on for two weeks, and she had heard the way I said the words no charge. I had not been as careful as I thought I was.

“I don’t think so, honey,” I finally said. “I think I’m being clear. There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t feel like one tonight.”

“Clear about what?” she said. So I told her. I told her about the twelve suppers in the spring, and the twelve requests, and the hundred and sixty eight dollars, and why I had paid every one and said nothing.

Abby listened to the whole thing without interrupting. When I was done, she sat back in her chair. “That’s so weird,” she said. “That’s not like her at all, Mom. That is not Aunt Tracy.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not.” And hearing my own daughter say it out loud, I knew she was right, and I knew I had known it all along.

“Did you ever ask her why?” Abby said. I opened my mouth, and I closed it again, because the honest answer was no.

In ten months I had never once asked Tracy why. I had decided what it meant, and I had carried it around like a stone in my coat pocket, turning it over and over, and I had never asked.

Abby got up and kissed the top of my head, which she does not do very often anymore.

The next night she drove the supper again, both hands on the wheel, the dish buckled into the front seat like a passenger.

Day thirty

By the last week she could manage a sandwich and a can of soup with her left hand.

I knew she did not need me anymore, not really. But I had said every night until she could hold a spoon, and I meant to finish it.

Day thirty fell on a Thursday in the middle of February. It had been snowing since noon, the fine dry kind that comes sideways off the open fields, and by suppertime the blacktop was white from ditch to ditch.

I made meatloaf and mashed potatoes, because that was what Tracy had brought to my mother-in-law the week after Doug’s dad died, and I thought she might remember. I wrapped it in foil and taped one last note to the lid.

Abby had made a pan of scotcheroos that afternoon, Tracy’s favorite, the ones with the butterscotch and chocolate on top. She wanted to bring them.

She had written her own note on a sheet of paper and taped it to her foil, and she would not let me read it.

When we pulled in, the porch light was on, and Greg’s propane truck was in the drive for once.

Abby stayed at the bottom of the porch steps with the scotcheroos in a plastic container while I carried the meatloaf up the steps. My boots squeaked on the fresh snow Doug had not had a chance to shovel yet.

The door opened before I could knock. Tracy was already standing there, as if she had been waiting at the window.

She was still in the pink chenille bathrobe, but her hair was brushed and braided, the way Abby had done it the night before.

Her good hand was holding a white envelope. Her eyes were red, and her face was set the way it gets at the funeral lunches when she is holding everything together for everybody else.

“Jill,” she said. “Before you hand me that.”

She held the envelope out to me. Her hand was shaking, and I do not think it was the cold.

“There’s something I should have told you last spring,” she said. “Will you come in? Please. Abby too. Greg’s home. He wants to be here for it.”

I called Abby up from the car. We stamped the snow off our boots and went into the kitchen, and I set the meatloaf on the counter where I had set twenty nine suppers before it.

Greg was sitting at the table with his cap in his hands.