The Chow Chow Table Under the Oak

Ashlyn came on Sunday at five till two, in an old apron that had belonged to somebody else, from a yard sale probably. I had a clean one of Mama’s waiting for her on the back of a chair. I gave her that.

I took the card out of the cedar box and the sandwich bag and laid it on the kitchen table between us. I let her hold it.

She held it like it might fall apart in the air. She read every word, Mama’s little notes too. “Don’t skimp the mustard seed.” “More hot if it’s for Bud.” “Salt it the night before or don’t bother.”

“Who’s Bud?” she asked.

“My daddy,” I said. “He liked it hot enough to make his ears red.”

Then she found the stain on the corner. She touched it with one finger. “What’s this?”

“That’s Mama’s thumb,” I said. “Tomato juice. I always figured she picked it up while she was cutting and didn’t think twice about it.”

Ashlyn looked at it a long time. Then she put her thumb next to it, without me saying a word, the same way I used to.

Her thumb was just about the same size.

I had to go stand at the sink for a minute.

We picked the last of the cabbages together that afternoon. I showed her how to cut the cores out in a cone so the leaves don’t fall apart. I showed her how fine to chop the peppers, and why you salt it the night before, and how to tell when the vinegar has cooked down enough.

She had been doing a lot of it a little bit wrong. Not wrong enough for anybody at the market to notice. But wrong enough that I could taste it, and Mama would have tasted it from across the room.

She took notes on her phone. Then she put the phone down and took notes on paper instead, in pencil, on an index card I gave her from my drawer.

That week we talked about the money, too. She wanted to give me all of it, every dollar from every Saturday. She had it in an envelope. Better than two thousand dollars.

I would not take it. That money had paid for jars and sugar and her gas and part of a roof, and I was not going to take a roof off my grandbaby’s room.

Instead we made a deal. From then on, we would split it down the middle after costs. My half would go into a savings account at my bank in the baby’s name. I opened it myself on Monday morning at my own window.

The next Saturday there was one table under the oak, not two.

Mama’s picture stood at the front, in the same dollar-store frame. The jars had new labels, plain white stickers, all written by hand. Ashlyn had done half of them and I had done the other half, and you could tell whose were whose.

The sign was a new piece of poster board. Ashlyn lettered it, because her hand is steadier than mine. It said, “Ida Mae’s Chow-Chow. Put up by Renee and Ashlyn. $7.”

We met in the middle on the price. Mama would have fussed at seven, but Mama never had to pay for pint jars in this decade.