The Recipe Box My Mother in Law Left Me

The funeral had been on Saturday, in the church where I stood up in my wedding dress. I sat in the fourth pew, behind Dennis and Marlene and a respectful distance from the family, and afterward the women of the church served ham on dinner rolls in the fellowship hall, on the same long tables.

I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a paper cup of coffee and watched Shay carry trays, because she is a person who cannot watch a room that needs doing.

The lawyer’s office sat above the hardware store on Main Street in Dalton, and on the Tuesday after Eldora’s funeral it smelled like furnace dust and the peppermints Gene Hostetler keeps in a dish for people who are about to hear things.

There were six of us around the conference table. My ex-husband Dennis sat at the head with his hands folded like a boy in church.

His sister Marlene had driven up from Cincinnati and taken the chair nearest the door, in case she needed to leave.

Our son Evan sat beside his wife Shay, and I took the last chair, the one by the window, because I was not sure I belonged at the table at all.

I had been Eldora Birchard’s daughter in law for thirty years. I had been her former daughter in law for two.

I am going to be honest about a good deal in this story, and most of it does not make me look wise.

I never once got along with that woman. In thirty years, I could not name you five things she said to me that were not a correction.

Gene read the will in his flat, careful voice. The quilts went to Marlene, all eleven of them, and she pressed her lips together and nodded.

The ground, forty acres that a neighbor had rented for years, went to Dennis. Evan got his grandfather’s pocket watch, the one with the cracked crystal that never kept time.

Then Gene took off his glasses and set them on the blotter, and I knew we had come to something that was not in the typed will.

“There’s one more item,” he said. “Eldora brought it in herself. She was very particular about how it was handled.”

He bent down behind his desk and came up with a wooden box about the size of a loaf of bread.

He carried it around the table and he did not set it in front of Dennis. He slid it across the polished wood in front of me.

It was pine, the corners worn soft and dark from hands.

The hinged lid had a strip of white adhesive tape stuck across the top, the kind they sell in the hardware store downstairs, and on the tape, in blue ballpoint, in a slanted hand I could have picked out of a thousand, it said Connie.