The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

“Paula, you are ninety-two years old,” my aunt Pam said, drying a gravy boat that was already dry. “Four hundred pierogi is too much for anybody. It’s too much for a woman half your age.”

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, a little past two in the afternoon. The turkey was down to a carcass under foil, and the whole kitchen smelled of coffee and sage and the pie nobody had finished.

Grandma sat at the head of her long wooden table with a cup of tea in front of her. She had not touched it in ten minutes. Her hands were folded on the wood.

“I’ve already booked the caterer,” Pam went on. “They do a very nice potato and cheese. Frozen, but nobody will know the difference. You just rest this year, Paula. Let somebody else carry it.”

Nobody else in that kitchen breathed. Grandma folded her dish towel in thirds, the way she always did, and hung it on the oven door. Then she smoothed it flat with two fingers.

“Well,” she said.

That was all. She picked up her cup and finally drank from it.

I want to tell this plainly, because there are two women in it I love, and I have caught myself more than once trying to make one of them the villain.

She was not one. I will get to that. But at that table, in that moment, I wanted to say a great deal, and my mouth was already open.

Grandma looked at me over the rim of her cup. It was a small look. It said, sit still, Megan. So I sat still.

My name is Megan Dunleavy. I am forty-one, a dental hygienist in Columbus, Ohio, and I had driven six and a half hours that Wednesday to be in the house where I learned to walk.

Grandma is Paula Wozniak. She lives on four acres outside Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, in the farmhouse my grandfather Stan bought in 1958 with mine wages and a loan from his brother. Stan has been gone eleven years. Grandma still sets the radio to his station every morning at six.

For fifty Decembers, she ran the pierogi table at the parish Christmas sale. She started in 1976, when the old pastor asked the women for something that would sell, and she said she could make pierogi. She had never made more than six dozen at once in her life.

She made thirty-three dozen that first year, and they were gone in an hour. Every year since, it has been four hundred, give or take a handful.

Potato and farmer cheese, the way her mother made them in a house with a dirt floor near Krakow, and every edge pinched shut with her own thumb and finger.

The sale is on the second Saturday of December, at one in the afternoon, in the parish hall. The line starts at noon. People bring lawn chairs. That was what Pam was taking from her, over a dry gravy boat.