The Flour Sifter They Left Me

The reading of the will was the last time we were all in one room

I want to tell you about a kitchen tool. A dented tin cylinder with a wooden crank handle painted red once, worn down now to bare pale wood where a thumb had turned it ten thousand mornings. That is where this story ends up, so I might as well start there. But you would not understand why I cried in a lawyer’s office over a flour sifter unless I tell you the whole thing.

My name is Ruth Ann Calloway. I am sixty-two years old, and I live in a town in central Missouri that you have never heard of, a place of two stoplights and one water tower and a Casey’s that everybody treats like the county seat. My grandmother, Della Mae Hartley, raised me more than my own mother did, and when she died at ninety-one, in the same iron bed she had slept in for fifty years, I thought the grief would be the hard part. I was wrong. The grief I could have carried. It was the family that nearly broke me.

We buried her on a Tuesday in October, under a sky the color of dishwater, in the little cemetery behind Bethel Free Will Baptist where three generations of Hartleys already lay. The preacher said she had gone home to glory, and half the county came to say amen, because half the county had eaten her pie at one time or another. One week later, we all sat down in the office of a lawyer named Prewitt to hear what she had left behind.

There were four of us who mattered that day. My cousin Denise, who had moved to Kansas City and married a man who sold insurance and who called our grandmother “Nana” in a voice she saved for company. My cousin Brett, Denise’s younger brother, who had a way of shaking your hand while looking over your shoulder for somebody more important. My aunt Carol, my mother’s sister, who had not so much as brought Della a jar of soup in the last ten years of her life. And me. The one who had lived four miles down the gravel from that farmhouse my whole life. The one who had been there, every Saturday of my childhood and most Saturdays of my adulthood, standing at that woman’s elbow in that hot kitchen learning what her hands knew.