The Porch by the Bus Stop

Chicken and Noodles

When she could talk again, she wiped her face and pushed the sack of flour across the table toward me.

“I have to ask you something,” she said. “And you can say no. The kids keep asking for their mom’s chicken and noodles. Every Sunday. Lily asks the most. I tried it from the card in the cabinet, and I did something wrong, and it came out like soup, and Lily cried.”

She took a breath. “Would you teach me? I don’t want to take anything from Kelsey. I just want those kids to have it. Lily said you’re the only one who knows how it’s supposed to be.”

I did not answer right away. I could not. I stood up and went to my own cabinet, and I took down a big yellow mixing bowl that had been my mother’s, and I set it on the table in front of her. That was my answer.

We made the noodles from scratch. Flour, eggs, a little salt, a splash of milk, and the pinch of nutmeg and the bay leaf in the broth that Kelsey always added.

I showed Ashley how to roll the dough thin enough to see the grain of the table through it.

I showed her how to let the noodles dry on a clean dish towel over the back of a chair for an hour, which was the step she had skipped.

Wet noodles go to mush in the pot. That was why it came out like soup. She laughed when I told her, and then she cried again.

While the noodles dried, she asked me about Kelsey. Not the way people ask at a funeral, polite and quick.

She asked real questions. What Kelsey liked to read. What made her laugh. What she was like at nine, at Lily’s age.

So I told her. I told her about the summer Kelsey was nine and decided to raise a calf for the 4-H show at the DeWitt County Fair, and how that calf dragged her through a mud puddle in front of the whole grandstand, and how she got up and finished the ring anyway.

By two o’clock we had a pot of chicken and noodles big enough for a church supper.

I spooned some into a container for her to take home, and I wrote the recipe out for her on a fresh card in my handwriting, with the nutmeg and the bay leaf underlined twice.

At the door, she turned around. “He’s going to come see you,” she said.

“I told him he has to. I’m not going to tell you what to say to him. But he’s going to come.”