The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

Pam did not look at any of us while she talked. She looked at the towel. She is sixty-eight, and she married my uncle Ed when she was nineteen, in the spring of 1977. She moved into the little house on the back corner of Grandma’s land, a hundred yards from this very kitchen.

She has kept the parish books for thirty years. She can tell you what the church spent on candles in 1998. She has never once been asked to make a pierogi. I did not think about that part then. I thought about it later, and I am sorry it took me so long.

“Pam,” Uncle Ed said from the doorway. He had come in for a plate of leftover pie. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”

“We are not talking, Ed. It’s decided. I’ve put down the deposit, a hundred and fifty dollars, nonrefundable.” She put the gravy boat in the cabinet and shut the door harder than it needed. “Somebody has to be sensible.”

Ed looked at his mother. Then he looked at the pie. He did not say another word.

I will say this for my uncle, because the men in my family deserve fairness too.

He is seventy, he has driven a milk truck and a plow and still drives a school bus route three mornings a week, and he is not a man who frightens easily. But he was frightened of something in that kitchen. I could see it in his shoulders.

Later that afternoon, I found Grandma on the back porch in her barn coat, watching the light go. Out past the garden stood a line of bare maples, and beyond them the long gray ridge, and the first lights coming on down in the valley.

“Grandma,” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell her no?”

She did not answer at once. “You can’t win an argument with a scared woman, Megan,” she said finally. “Not ever. The harder you push, the harder she holds on.”

“Scared of what? A pierogi sale?”

“I’m not going to tell you her business.” She pulled the coat tighter. “And I’m not going to fight her. I fought her once, in 1983, over a casserole dish, and I still feel bad about it. The answer isn’t in a fight. The answer is in the dough.”

I stood there with my arms crossed, shivering in a sweater, waiting for the rest of the sentence. There wasn’t any. She patted my hand like I was six, and went in to start the dishes.

That night I lay awake in my old bedroom under the slanted ceiling, staring at the water stain shaped like Florida. I turned the phrase over a hundred ways. The answer is in the dough. Around midnight, I took my phone down to the kitchen table and opened the group text.

There is a group text for the granddaughters. It has been going since Grandpa’s funeral, and it is mostly pictures of babies and recipes and complaints about husbands. There are fourteen of us.