The Weekend at Grandma’s Brick Bungalow

The drawer left of the stove

Mom had taken over the kitchen by then, because that is what my mother does in any kitchen she stands in for five minutes.

She’d brought a pot roast in a cooler and a sack of Jonathan apples from a farm stand outside Moline.

“I’m making Mother’s apple crisp for tomorrow,” she said, tying on Grandma’s old apron from the hook. “Supper at five, the four of us. Do you still have her recipe cards?”

“Same place they always were,” I said. “Left of the stove.”

The drawer to the left of the stove was the drawer. Every house has one.

Grandma’s held rubber bands, twist ties, birthday candles, a church key and coupons from a Lincoln grocery that closed years ago.

It also held her recipe cards in a tin box, and every important paper she ever owned.

When the house came to me, I kept the house papers there too. It was where she’d kept hers.

There was a folder sitting right on top of the recipe tin, where it had sat for two years, with “House papers” written on the front in my handwriting.

Mom pulled the drawer open and reached for the tin, and saw the folder on top of it. She lifted it out to get at the tin. And then she didn’t put it down.

In the living room, I heard the couch springs creak. My sister knew that drawer as well as any of us. She had grown up opening it for birthday candles, the same as me.

Mom opened the folder. I didn’t stop her and I didn’t help her. I stood by the sink and dried a glass that was already dry, and then I dried it again.

Right on top was the deed from the Logan County clerk and recorder, with my name on it as owner and the date it was recorded, two Octobers ago.

Under it were the property tax bills, both installments for both years, each one marked paid. I had written my check number in the corner of every one, the way Grandma always did.

Under those were the insurance papers, also in my name. And clipped together with one of Grandma’s clothespins were two years of Ameren statements, every one addressed to me, every one paid from my checking account.

Mom turned the pages slowly. Then she went back to the beginning and turned them again, more slowly, as if there had to be one more page somewhere that would make it all come out right.