The Chow Chow Table Under the Oak

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said. “I’m asking if you’ll teach me right. Not off the copy. The real way. Like she did it. And I’ll take my name off. I’ll take everything off. I’ll give you the money.”

I did not know what to say. I had planned a lot of things over that week, but I had not planned for that.

Before I could answer, Mr. Purcell got up out of his chair.

It took him a while. He put one hand on my table and one hand on his knee and came up slow. Then he picked up Mama’s picture, very carefully, and held it out so Ashlyn could see it close.

“Young lady,” he said, “I want to tell you something about this woman.”

Ashlyn looked at him like he might be about to scold her. So did I, to be honest.

“My wife passed in 1998,” Mr. Purcell said. “Ovarian cancer. I didn’t eat for about two months. Lost thirty pounds. I’d go on my route and come home and sit in the dark.”

He tapped the frame with one finger.

“Every Saturday that whole fall, Ida Mae Parrish put a jar of this in my mailbox. Every single one. With a pan of cornbread wrapped in foil. Never a note. Never let me pay for one. I tried to give her money at the market and she’d put it right back in my shirt pocket.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I didn’t.

“She didn’t want anybody to know,” he said. He looked at Ashlyn. “She used to say a jar of chow-chow wasn’t hers. She said it belonged to whoever needed it. She said she was just the one holding the spoon.”

Ashlyn’s face crumpled. She put both hands over it and stood there by my table and cried, with the market emptying out around us and the egg man pretending not to look.

Mr. Purcell set the picture back down on the table, square with the edge, the way a mail carrier sets down a package.

“So I reckon,” he said, “if you want to know whose recipe it is, it’s whoever’s holding the spoon. Long as they hold it the way she did.”

He picked up his sack, nodded to both of us, and walked off toward the drugstore with his hat on.

I came around the table. I put my arms around my daughter-in-law and the baby both. She was shaking all over. She smelled like vinegar and cabbage, like my mother’s kitchen in September.

“Sunday,” I said into her hair. “Two o’clock. My house. Bring an apron.”

That evening Wes came by. He had heard from somebody at the tire shop whose aunt was at the market. In a town this size, news gets to the bypass before you get home from the square.

He stood in my kitchen doorway with his cap in his hands and could not look at me.

“Mama, I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know about the sign. I thought she was telling people it was Grandmama’s. I’d have stopped it.”

“I know you would have,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he said, “That’s about the most Grandmama thing you’ve ever done.”

I took that as the compliment he meant it to be. He hugged me so hard he lifted me off the floor, and then he went home to his wife, which is where he belonged.