The Four Lids on My Counter

Bernadine said, “I remember.” She cut a piece of turkey and did not eat it.

“Six of us boys and her,” Frank said, pointing his fork down the table at his sister. “Out past Ferdinand, on the farm. Dad and the hired man ate first, because they worked. Then Mom. Then the boys, oldest to youngest. Then Bernie.”

“Then me,” Bernadine said. “I was the youngest and I was the girl.”

She said it like you would say what the weather was, and I watched Lily’s face across the table go still, because Lily is a girl, and she is in the middle, and she can do arithmetic.

“Some nights there wasn’t any meat by the time it got to me,” Bernadine said. “Mom would pour the gravy over a slice of bread and put an egg on it if the hens were laying. I thought that was a supper. I didn’t know it was a leftover till I was grown.”

“Gravy bread,” Neil said, quietly. “I remember Grandma making it.”

“Well,” Bernadine said, “she made it for me first.”

Nobody said anything to that. There is not anything to say. I looked down at my own plate with more food on it than I could eat and felt about two inches tall, and also, at the same time, not sorry for one thing.

I have learned that you can feel both of those at once.

You can know that somebody has a reason, a real one, a hungry little girl at the end of a long farm table, and still know that your boy is not going to pay that bill for her.

The rest of it I learned at the sink, after. I was washing and Neil was drying, which is how we do it, and everybody else was in the living room with the Lions game on and the kids in the basement.

“You didn’t know about the freezer,” he said. It was not a question.

“What freezer?”

“Mom’s. The chest freezer in her basement. Since Dad died.” He dried a pan for longer than a pan needs drying. “I went down for a bag of ice in July. It’s full, Laurel. It’s full of these.”

He nodded at the counter where the four containers sat, two empty, two still full, with the four lids stacked beside them.

“Labeled,” he said. “Thanksgiving turkey, last year. Easter ham. Renee’s birthday lasagna. Christmas. Everything in its own container, with the date on masking tape. She eats it all winter. She makes one holiday last a month.”

I stood there with my hands in the dishwater and could not say anything for a minute.

“She gets Dad’s pension and her Social Security,” Neil said. “She’s not poor. She could buy a turkey breast. It isn’t the money. I think it’s the cooking for one person. I think she can’t stand to do it. So she brings it home from us.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”