The Chow Chow Table Under the Oak

I am forty-eight. I have been a teller at the same bank on Main Street for twenty-two years. I raised my son mostly by myself after his daddy and I split up when he was six.

My son is Wes. He is twenty-nine, tall like his daddy, with my mother’s hands. He is a lineman’s helper with the electric co-op, and he married Ashlyn two years ago this June.

I want to be fair to Ashlyn from the start, because the rest of this will not always sound fair to her.

She came into our family quiet. She grew up mostly in other people’s houses, an aunt here, a cousin there, a foster home in Tifton for two years when she was little.

She does not talk about it much. What I know, I mostly know from Wes, and from the way she watches a family dinner like she is trying to learn the rules of a game nobody explained to her.

She is a hard worker. She cleans houses three days a week and she never once showed up at my door with her hand out. When she does ask for something, she asks for it like she is ready to be told no.

So in August, when she came by on a Tuesday evening and asked if she could pick some things out of my garden, I said yes before she finished the sentence.

“Just for a few jars, Miss Renee,” she said. “Wes loves that chow-chow your mama made. I thought maybe I could learn to make it for him. With the baby coming and all.”

I was so pleased I about cried. Nobody had asked me about Mama’s chow-chow since the funeral.

I walked her through the rows with a five-gallon bucket. Late tomatoes still green on the vine, the first fall cabbages, bell peppers, a handful of hot ones. I told her the hot ones were the whole secret, and not to touch her eyes.

Then I sat down at my kitchen table and copied Mama’s card out for her by hand on a sheet of notebook paper. Every measurement. Every one of Mama’s little notes in the margin.

I did not give her the card itself. I could not have done that for anybody. But I gave her everything that was on it.

She came back for more twice that month and three times in September. I did not think much of it. A few jars turns into a few more when you get the hang of something, and I figured she was stocking up before the baby.

Then on the first Friday in October, a woman from my church came through my line at the bank to cash a check.

Her name is Faye. She has sung alto in the choir for as long as I have been alive, and she talks while you count her money, which every teller in town knows to allow time for.

“Renee,” she said, “I have to tell you. Your Ashlyn’s chow-chow is the best I have had since I don’t know when.”

I smiled and said thank you, because I thought she meant Ashlyn had given her a jar.

“Nine dollars a pint,” Faye said, “and I thought that was high, but honey, it is worth every penny. I bought two last Saturday. She sells out by ten.”

I counted her twenties twice. I had to. I lost my place the first time.