The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

By eleven, we had boiled and buttered the last of them. Lisa and Jolynn stood at the dining room table with foil pans, a stack of cardboard lids and a roll of masking tape.

Twelve to a pan, in rows of three by four. Beth wrote the dozens on the tape, and Emily stacked the pans by the door.

Thirty-four pans. Four hundred and eight pierogi, and eight more on a plate for our lunch. We counted twice.

I had just cut the first slice of bread for the lunch plates when the phone on the kitchen wall rang again. Grandma looked at it and did not move.

After six rings, Lisa picked it up, and I heard the clatter of folding chairs behind a voice I knew. It was Uncle Ed, calling from the parish hall.

“Tell Mother the caterer’s truck came early,” he said. “Thirty pans, frozen, and the man wanted a signature on the spot. Pam signed.”

“She’s standing at the kitchen pass-through with a clipboard right now, and she doesn’t know about any of you. I haven’t said a word.”

“Why not?” Lisa asked him.

“Because I think she ought to see it herself,” Ed said. His voice cracked in the middle of the sentence. “Tell Mother I’ll hold the front door.”

Lisa repeated it all to the room. Grandma nodded once, the way you nod at the weather report, and untied the strings of her floral apron and tied them again, tighter.

“Then we will go and be seen,” she said.

We carried the pans out in a line, fourteen women and the two husbands who had been put to work at the stove, down the back steps and across the frozen yard.

Thirty-four foil pans, taped and labeled in Beth’s careful hand, stacked in the bed of Rose’s husband’s pickup under a topper that smelled of hay and old dog.

“I carry the first one,” Grandma said.

“Grandma, no,” Sophie said.

“I carry the first one.” She stood up slow, with Lisa’s hand under one elbow and Sophie’s under the other, and lifted the top pan from the stack. It held a dozen pierogi under a cardboard lid and weighed perhaps a pound and a half.

She walked it herself down the porch steps and across the yard, and set it in the truck, and patted the lid twice, the way you pat a horse.

“That is the first dozen,” she said. “Now you.”

We were loaded in four minutes. Then everybody piled into cars and followed the truck down the hill, nine vehicles in a line, with dish towels still tucked in our belts.

Nobody had thought to take them out. By the time we reached the county road, I had stopped wanting to.

The parish hall was the same as it has always been, with folding tables and paper tablecloths and a long window onto the parking lot. The line was already forty people deep on the sidewalk, and the cold had turned their breath to smoke.