The Chow Chow Table Under the Oak

“Nine dollars,” I said.

“At the market,” Faye said. “Under the big oak. You didn’t know? Well, I guess young people don’t tell us everything.”

She took her envelope and went on, and I stood there at my window with the next customer waiting and a feeling in my stomach like I had missed a step on the stairs.

The next morning I drove to the square at eight and parked across the street in front of the pharmacy. I did not get out. I just looked.

There she was. Under Mama’s oak, in Mama’s spot by the bend in the sidewalk, behind a folding table covered in jars.

She had a hand-lettered sign taped to the front of the table. I could read it from where I sat. It said, “Ashlyn’s Chow-Chow. My Own Family Recipe. $9.”

Her jar labels were printed, little round stickers from the office supply store. They said “Ashlyn’s” in curly letters across the top. I bought one later, so I know.

Her line was eight people deep. I knew most of them. Two of them had bought from Mama for twenty years.

I sat in that car for an hour and forty minutes and counted jars going out the way I count bills at work. I could not help it. It is what I do.

She sold forty-four pints by a quarter to ten. Forty-four times nine is three hundred ninety-six dollars. Call it four hundred dollars, every Saturday morning.

Out of my garden. My seed, saved by my mother. Off a copy of my mother’s card, written out in my own hand.

And somebody had asked her, I would bet my life on it, whose recipe that was. And she had made a sign.

I drove home and sat in my own driveway another forty minutes with the engine off. I am not a crier. I did not cry. I just sat.

I will tell you what I was not thinking about. I was not thinking about the money.

The garden costs me some seed and some water and my back. Ashlyn had paid for her own jars and her own sugar and vinegar, as far as I could tell. Four hundred dollars a week is a lot of money, but it was not my money she was making.

What I was thinking about was Mama standing under that oak for thirty-one years with her hair pinned up, putting extra jars in old men’s sacks.

And now a printed sticker with somebody else’s name on it, and a sign that said that recipe came out of somebody else’s family.

I knew some things about why, even then. I knew the co-op had cut Wes’s hours back in June when they lost a big contract. I knew he had picked up Saturdays at the tire shop out on the bypass to make up the difference.

I knew they had a baby coming in January and a car payment and a rent house with a roof that leaked over the back bedroom, which was supposed to be the nursery.

I knew all that. I did not know about this.

Wes came by that Sunday after church like he always does. Ashlyn did not come. She said she had a headache.

I could have said something to him right then. I almost did. He was standing in my kitchen eating cold fried chicken out of the refrigerator with his fingers, the way he has since he was nine.