The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

I called Grandma twice. Both times she said, “Everything’s fine, Megan. Come Friday.” Both times, I heard Pam’s car pull into the driveway behind her voice.

On the Friday before, I left work at noon and drove east on I-70 with a trunk full of flour.

Seven pounds of it, plus a bag of rice flour for the board, plus two jelly glasses I had stolen from my own cupboard. I got to the farm at half past six with the porch light on.

The house was already full. There were cars in the yard and a minivan nosed up against the woodpile, and somebody’s sleeping bag hung drying over the porch rail, though I could not have told you why.

Inside, the kitchen smelled of onions and boiled potato. Grandma stood at the stove in her slippers with a wooden spoon, and Lisa and Jolynn flanked her like bodyguards.

“I’m making the filling,” Grandma said without turning. “They want to help. I told them to hold the bowl.”

“Hello, Grandma.”

“Hello, my girl.” She turned then and looked me up and down. “You are thin.”

“I am not thin.”

“You are thin. Sit. Eat.”

I sat. I ate. I watched her tip a whole bowl of riced potato into a bowl of farmer cheese and fold it together with her bare hands, the sleeves of her blue housedress pushed up.

Her hands shook a little. They always have, these last few years. But they were steady as a clock when they were in the filling.

“Where’s Uncle Ed?” I asked Lisa, low.

“Setting up tables at the hall. He’s called twice. He wants to know if we’re still on.”

“Does Pam know?”

Lisa gave me a look. “She knows there’s a caterer. That’s all she knows.”

We slept on the floors and the sofas and in the two spare rooms. I took the couch in the front room, and lay in the dark listening to the old house tick, and thought about how many pierogi had been made in that kitchen. Ten thousand, maybe. Twenty. I fell asleep before I could count.

Saturday began at six, with the radio and the smell of coffee. By seven, the long wooden table had been wiped, floured and wiped again. The dough Grandma had made the night before, nine pounds of it, rested under a towel at the end of the counter.

Grandma took her seat at the head of the table, where she has sat for sixty-seven years. Somebody had set out her floral apron, the one she wears only on sale day, and Sophie tied it on her from behind.

The sun came through the window over the stove, bright and hard, with the clean look it gets in December when the whole valley is dry and frozen. It lit the flour in the air so that we seemed to be standing inside a snow globe. A red checked dish towel and a flowered one hung over the oven door.