My two sisters stood at my mother’s open casket and told me to work the recipe card out of her fingers, since it was the only thing she’d left worth a dime. “You’re the reason Mom had nothing,” my older sister said, with the whole guest line listening. I put my hand on the lid. I’d made Mom a promise in the hospital.
The card was her buttermilk pie.
Forty years of church suppers and wakes, and that pie went to every one of them, and the card lived in the same tin by her stove since before I could read.
Two weeks before she died, she pressed it into my palm from the hospital bed.
“You put this in my hand at Mulder’s,” she said. “And NOBODY takes it out till Garland reads the will. Nobody, Shane.”
I asked her why.
She asked me for the remote.
So on Monday night, there it was, tucked under her thumb, her nails done in the coral color Ileana painted on her every Saturday.
Robin spotted it in about four minutes.
“Is that the pie card?” she said.
“It’s staying there.”
Robin is sixty-one and runs the bakery counter at the grocery store out on the bypass in Muncie. She’d been after that recipe for ten years, and Mom always told her she could have it when she was dead.
Well.
“Shane. Take it out. Before they close her up.”
“They’re not closing anything till Wednesday.”
Ileana came up behind her. Ileana is forty-eight and still lets Robin do the talking, then agrees with it louder.
“She had two hundred and fourteen dollars in checking,” Ileana said. “Two hundred and fourteen. The house is mortgaged to the roof. That card is all that’s left of her.”
“I know what was in checking. I paid her light bill out of mine.”
Robin laughed. Ten feet from the guest book, she laughed.
“Out of what? Your unemployment?”
The trailer plant let me go in March.
Twenty-seven years of laying bead on frame rails, and a man in a golf shirt handed me a folder and a cardboard box for my gloves. In April I moved into Mom’s back bedroom because her knees were going, and because I had nowhere else to put a box of gloves.
Robin had decided what that meant a long time ago.
“You moved in and she went broke,” she said. “Do the math, Shane.”
“Robin.”
“No. Everybody in here should hear it. YOU’RE THE REASON MOM HAD NOTHING.”
That one carried.
A woman from Mom’s choir set the guest book pen down. Hugh Mulder came out of his office holding a box of tissues, like that was going to help anybody.
I had been sending Mom money every other Friday since 2007.
Two hundred and forty dollars a check.
She never asked for a cent of it. Dad’s pension stopped when Dad did, and she raised the three of us on a school cafeteria paycheck and never once said she was tired.
I never told my sisters. It was between me and her.
Now the whole room had an opinion on it.
Robin reached past me for the casket.
I laid my forearm across the lid and left it there.
“Don’t,” I said.
“She’s my mother too.”
“Then do what she asked.”
Ileana had her phone up. I still don’t know who she thought she was sending it to.
“You are unbelievable,” Robin said. “You ate her groceries for eight months and now you’re standing guard over a PIE.”
“I’m standing guard over her.”
Hugh walked over and said maybe the family would be more comfortable in the side room. Robin told him she was NOT going into any side room.
Then she went into the side room.
I stayed with Mom until they shut the lights off at nine.
The carpet at Mulder’s has little gold anchors woven into it. I counted forty-one between the casket and the door, and I couldn’t tell you why.
Garland Contreras read the will Tuesday at ten, in that same side room, with the casket rolled in because Mom had asked for it in writing.
Garland did her taxes for thirty years. He looked about as glad to be there as I was.
He read the house first. That was the bank’s.
The car went to Ileana, who’d been driving it since June anyway.
Then he stopped and took off his glasses.
“There’s a lockbox,” he said. “In her bedroom closet, under the shoe rack. Carol was very specific that I never open it.”
Robin sat up so fast her chair scraped.
“How much is in it?”
“I couldn’t tell you. She never told me. She said the combination is in her hand.”
Every head in that room came around to me.
Then to the casket.
“Shane,” Garland said. “She wrote that you’re the one who takes it out.”
So I did.
Her fingers were cold and set, and I had to ease her thumb back slow, the same way she used to move mine around a pencil when I was learning my letters.
The front was the pie. Buttermilk, sugar, three eggs, that big loopy B of hers.
I turned it over.
Four numbers in blue ink.
And under them, in the same shaky hand from the hospital, one line that started with Robin’s name.
Robin was already on her feet.
“What does it SAY?”
Ten o’clock, the side room
I read it to myself first. I wanted to be sure of every word before it went out into that room.
0 9 1 5.
Robin knows what day this is. It was never Shane.
“Read it,” Robin said. “Out loud. You don’t get to keep that one.”
So I read the line. Just the line.
“Robin knows what day this is. It was never Shane.”
Nobody moved for a second. Garland put his glasses back on, like he might need them for whatever came next.
Robin held her hand out across the table.
“Let me see the numbers.”
“Garland,” I said. “Does the will say?”
He found the page. He read it in the same voice he’d used for the house.
“The box is to be opened by my son, Shane, with Garland present, and with both my daughters there to see it. Shane keeps the card until then.”
“That’s convenient,” Robin said.
“It’s her handwriting, Robin. You’ve seen it on every birthday card you ever got.”
I put the card in my shirt pocket, behind the pen I’d brought and never used. I buttoned the pocket. I don’t know why I did that either. My hands wanted a job.
Ileana was still sitting down. She was looking at the casket, at Mom’s thumb with nothing under it now.
“What day is it?” Ileana said. “Robin? What day?”
“How would I know what day she means. She was on morphine for a month.”
“She wrote it two weeks before,” I said. “She asked me for the remote right after. She knew what she was doing.”
Robin sat back down. She smoothed her skirt with both hands, the way she does at the counter when somebody’s complaining about a cake.
Then she smiled at Garland.
“It’s their anniversary,” she said. “Mom and Dad’s. She always got weepy about it.”
Ileana didn’t look up from the casket.
“Their anniversary’s in June, Robin.”
The tin by the stove
The tin was a red Folgers can with the label painted over in white. It sat on the back left corner of the stove, where the burner never worked.
When I was six I tried to get a card out of it to look at the pictures I thought were on them. Mom slapped the back of my hand with a wooden spoon. Not hard. Hard enough.
“Nobody goes in my tin but me,” she said.
Nobody did. Not in forty-some years. Robin used to say that tin had more locks on it than Fort Knox, and it didn’t have one.
The pie came out of that tin for every church supper, every wake, every Fourth of July. It came out when Mrs. Lewandowski’s husband died and when the Methodist church burned and the Baptists fed everybody for a week. People asked for that recipe at every one of those tables.
Mom gave them all the same answer. She’d smile and say it was mostly patience.
I remember the lunch after Dad’s funeral, in March of 2007. It was in our kitchen because the church basement was flooded. Mom stood at the counter cutting that pie into twelve pieces, and she said something I’ve never forgotten.
“This house is the one thing I own outright. Your dad made the last payment in ’98. It’s yours three’s when I go, and nobody can take it.”
Robin was there. Ileana was there. Ileana was twenty-nine and crying into a paper plate.
I started the checks two Fridays later.
Mom tore up the first one and mailed me the pieces. I sent another. She tore that one up too. The third one she cashed, and she called me that night and said, “Fine. But I’m writing it down. Every one.”
And she did. Mom wrote everything down. Thirty-one years in the school cafeteria counting lunch money had done that to her. She kept steno pads, the kind with the wire on top, and she wrote every dollar in and every dollar out with the date in front.
I never looked at them. It was her money once I sent it.
Robin’s shop opened in the spring of 2014. A real bakery on Walnut Street, with her name in gold on the window and a glass case and two girls in aprons. She’d been a counter manager at the grocery for eighteen years by then, and she said she was done making other people’s cakes.
The first thing she asked Mom for was the pie.
“Just the card, Mom. I’ll put your name on it. Carol’s Buttermilk. People would drive from Anderson for it.”
“When I’m dead,” Mom said.
“Mom.”
“When I’m dead, Robin, you can have it, and you can put whoever’s name on it you want.”
Robin went home mad. She stayed mad for about a month, and then she came to Sunday dinner like nothing happened, and she brought a pie from her own case. It wasn’t right. The crust was too thick and the middle was too sweet, and Mom ate the whole slice anyway and said it was real nice.
The shop closed in the fall of 2016. Robin said the oven went out and the landlord was a crook. She went back to the grocery on the bypass. Same counter, same apron color. Nobody in the family brought up Walnut Street again.
That was the house I came home to in April. Mom’s knees were bad, and the stairs to the basement were worse. I did her laundry and carried her groceries in and paid the light bill when the envelope showed up red.
I figured her money was going to the doctors. Eighty-one years old, three prescriptions. That’s where everybody’s money goes.
And in the side room at Mulder’s, Garland read the last part of the will. Mom had named me to settle the estate.
“Executor,” Robin said. “Of two hundred and fourteen dollars.”
“And the box,” Garland said. “Wednesday, after the burial. Three o’clock, at the house. All three of you, and me.”
Robin was the first one out the door.
The shoe rack
I stopped for gas on the way home. I sat at the pump a while with the card in my pocket, not taking it out.
When I turned onto Mom’s street, Robin’s Buick was in the driveway.
It was a quarter to twelve. The front door was unlocked. Mom gave all three of us a key in 1990, and none of us ever gave one back.
I could hear her before I got to the bedroom. Metal on metal.
Mom’s closet is a walk-in, if you can walk in sideways. The shoe rack was pulled out and lying on the carpet, with Mom’s church shoes and her house slippers spilled all over it. Robin was on her knees in her funeral skirt with Dad’s old socket set open beside her.
The lockbox was gray steel, about the size of a microwave, with a black dial on the front.
It was bolted to the floor. Four bolts, through the carpet, into the joists. Dad must have done it. That was the kind of thing Dad did on a Saturday.
Robin had one bolt half out. Her hands were shaking, and the ratchet kept slipping.
“What are you doing, Robin.”
She didn’t jump. She just stopped.
“I came to get her blue dress. For tomorrow.”
“You’re on the floor with Dad’s sockets.”
“The rack fell over. I was picking it up.”
I stood in the closet door. She stood up and brushed the carpet off her knees. There was a bolt in her hand. She didn’t seem to know what to do with it, so she held it.
“You heard Garland,” I said. “Three o’clock tomorrow. All of us.”
“Shane. Give me the card. I’ll open it and I’ll tell you what’s in it, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Why would you want it opened before Garland gets here?”
“Because I know you.” She pointed the bolt at me. “You’ve been in this house eight months. You’ve had eight months to put whatever you want in there.”
“I don’t have the combination. Nobody did. It was in her hand.”
“Then give it to me.”
“No.”
She looked at me a long time. Then she looked at the box. I don’t think she wanted to look at the box. Her eyes kept going back to it, the way your tongue goes to a bad tooth.
“Mom loved you best,” she said. “Everybody knew it. She’d have let you get away with anything.”
“Put the bolt down, Robin.”
She dropped it on the carpet. Then she went to the rod and started pushing through Mom’s dresses, the hangers going one after another, faster and faster.
“Where’s the blue one? Where’s the blue dress?”
I didn’t want to tell her. I told her anyway.
“She’s wearing the blue dress, Robin.”
Coupon number one
Robin left without saying anything else. The bolt was still on the carpet. I put it back in the hole and tightened it by hand, then with the ratchet.
That night I couldn’t sleep in the back bedroom. I went out to the kitchen at about one in the morning and sat at Mom’s table.
The tin was on the stove where it always was.
I’d never opened it. Not once in fifty-some years. I could still feel that wooden spoon.
But the card in my pocket had come out of that tin, and Mom had put it in my hand, and she’d made me executor of whatever was left. I figured that made it my tin now, whether I wanted it or not.
I took the lid off.
It smelled like flour and old paper. The recipe cards were packed in there tight, maybe sixty of them, with a few clippings from the Muncie Star folded in between. Meatloaf. Sugar cream pie. Something called Funeral Potatoes, which, God help me, I laughed at.
At the bottom, under the cards, there was a booklet.
It was the size of a checkbook, with a blue cover from the credit union out on McGalliard. Inside were coupons. One for every month, with a perforated edge, and a stub left behind every time one got torn out.
The stubs went on and on. On every one, in Mom’s hand, she’d written pd and the date.
I went back to the cover.
HOME EQUITY LOAN. Borrower: Carol Odom. Property: Mom’s house. Amount: $85,000. Monthly payment: $612.00. Term: 180 months.
I read it twice. Then I read it again with my finger under the words, the way I read a blueprint when I don’t trust it.
Dad made the last payment in ’98. She’d said it in this kitchen with a pie knife in her hand. The one thing she owned outright.
So somebody had put the house back in hock. And it was her name on the line.
I got a pencil out of the junk drawer and did the math on the back of an electric bill. Her Social Security was about thirteen hundred. My checks were four hundred and eighty a month. Take out six hundred and twelve for the loan. Take out the prescriptions and the gas bill and the insurance on the car Ileana drove.
It came out to about two hundred dollars a month to live on.
Two hundred and fourteen in checking.
She’d been paying for something for years, every month, and she’d been paying for it with my money. And she’d let me sit at this table and eat her groceries while Robin told the whole town I was the reason.
I wanted to know what it was for. Eighty-five thousand dollars. My mother never spent eighty-five thousand dollars on anything in her life. She bought her coats at Goodwill and her coffee on sale.
I turned the booklet over to look at the front again. There was a line under the amount I’d skipped the first two times.
Loan date: September 15, 2015.
Mrs. Lewandowski
We buried Mom on Wednesday morning at Elm Ridge, next to Dad. It was cold and bright. The wind kept taking the preacher’s pages.
Robin stood on one side of the grave. I stood on the other. Ileana stood next to Robin, but about a foot further off than usual.
The lunch was in the basement of Mom’s church. Folding tables, paper tablecloths, the long steel counter with the pass-through window into the kitchen. The choir ladies had made ham and green beans and three kinds of Jell-O. Somebody brought deviled eggs in one of those trays shaped like eggs.
And Robin brought a buttermilk pie from her counter at the grocery.
She set it right in the middle of the dessert table with a little card in front of it. In memory of Mom.
Mrs. Lewandowski came up beside me while I was getting coffee. She’s sung alto next to Mom for about thirty years. She was the one who’d put the guest book pen down Monday night.
“Shane,” she said.
“Mrs. Lewandowski.”
“Your sister says you’re going to make a scene at the house today. With the lawyer.” She held her plate with both hands. “She says you’ve been after your mother’s things since you moved in.”
“Did she.”
“I’m only telling you what’s being said. Carol would be ashamed, if it was true.”
“I know she would.”
She looked at me like she wanted me to say more. I didn’t. She went and sat down with the other altos, and they all looked over at me and then looked away.
I found Robin in the kitchen, behind the pass-through, cutting her own pie. She was making the pieces too big. Mom always cut twelve.
I put the coupon booklet on the counter next to the pie.
She looked at it for a second. Then she kept cutting.
“Where’d you get that.”
“The tin.”
“You went in Mom’s tin.”
“September fifteenth, 2015. Eighty-five thousand dollars.” I tapped the blue cover. “Your shop was open on Walnut Street in September of 2015.”
“A lot of things were open in 2015.”
“What did you need eighty-five thousand dollars for, Robin?”
She put the knife down. She wiped her hands on a paper towel, one finger at a time.
“You want to do this here? In the church kitchen? At her funeral?”
“You did it at her viewing.”
“I said what everybody was thinking.” She leaned in. Her voice went low and flat, the voice she uses on the phone with suppliers. “You open that box today and there’s anything in it with my name on it, I’ll tell every person upstairs that you wrote it. You’ve had the run of that house for eight months. You’ve got her handwriting all over every bill on the table. Who do you think they believe? The one who drove her to church every Sunday, or the one who moved in and she went broke?”
“Garland will be there.”
“Garland’s a tax man. He’ll believe what he’s paid to.”
Ileana was standing in the kitchen doorway. I don’t know how long she’d been there. She had a stack of paper plates in her hands and her face had gone white as the plates.
“Robin,” she said. “Don’t.”
Robin picked up the knife again and pointed it at the booklet, not at me.
“Open it, then. And see who believes you.”
Zero, nine, one, five
Garland’s Buick pulled in behind Robin’s at five till three. He had a yellow legal pad and a pen clipped to it, and he wiped his shoes on Mom’s mat for a long time before he came in.
The four of us stood in Mom’s bedroom. There wasn’t room for four people in the closet, so I pulled the shoe rack out into the room and laid it on the bed.
Robin had her arms crossed.
“Ileana,” she said. “Get your phone out. Film all of it. Start to finish. I want it on record what’s in there before he touches anything.”
Ileana got her phone out. She held it up and pointed it at the box.
“Go ahead,” Robin said. “Executor.”
I got down on my knees on the carpet where Robin had knelt the day before. The bolt I’d put back was a little crooked.
I took the card out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the carpet, face down, numbers up.
0 9 1 5.
The dial was stiff. I turned it right to zero, all the way around twice, the way Dad taught me on my gym locker. Left to nine. Right to one. Left to five.
The handle came down.
Nobody said anything. I could hear the refrigerator out in the kitchen.
The lid opened up and back. Taped to the inside of it, with yellowed Scotch tape, was an index card. The same kind as in the tin. Same blue ink, that loopy hand, but steady. She’d written this one a long time before the hospital.
Shane. I’m sorry. I let you pay for it and I let them think what they wanted. I didn’t know how to tell you. Mom.
I didn’t read it out loud. I didn’t need to. Garland was standing right over my shoulder, and he took his glasses off again.
Under the card there was a big manila envelope from the credit union. I handed it to Garland without opening it. He slid out the papers and turned through them.
“Home equity loan,” he said. “September fifteenth, 2015. Eighty-five thousand. Carol signed it. Nobody else on it.”
“So she took a loan,” Robin said. “So what. People take loans.”
Under the envelope there was a stack of Mom’s steno pads, rubber-banded together. Nine of them. The top one said 2015 on the cover in marker.
And on top of the steno pads was a single sheet of paper folded in thirds.
It was torn off a steno pad. You could see the little ragged holes along the top from the wire. It wasn’t Mom’s writing. It was rounder, bigger, with circles over the i’s.
I’ve seen that writing on twenty years of Christmas cards. On the window on Walnut Street, too, when they painted it in gold.
I held it up so Ileana’s phone could see it. I read it out loud, slow, because that’s how I read anything that matters.
“Mom. I will pay the six hundred and twelve every month until the shop is on its feet, and then I will pay off the whole thing. I swear on Dad. Robin. Nine, fifteen, fifteen.”
Robin uncrossed her arms.
There was one more line at the bottom, in different ink, smaller. Somebody had signed as a witness.
Witness: Ileana Odom.
The steno pads
Ileana’s phone came down an inch. Then she put it back up.
“Keep filming,” I said. “She asked you to.”
Robin took a step toward me and stopped.
“That’s a family thing. That was between me and Mom. That has nothing to do with the estate, Garland, you can’t put that on your pad.”
“I can put anything I find in the box on my pad,” Garland said. “That’s what the pad is for.”
I pulled the rubber band off the steno pads and opened the one that said 2015. Mom’s columns went down every page. The dates on the left, the dollars on the right.
October 15. R 612.
November 15. R 612.
December 15. R 612.
I turned pages. Garland bent down and turned them with me. R 612 went on every month, and then it stopped. November of 2016 was the last one. I counted them out loud. Fourteen.
After that the column changed. Every other Friday there was an S 240. And every fifteenth, in the same pen, Loan 612.
It went on through 2017. Through 2018. I opened the last pad, the one that said 2026. October 15. Loan 612. Then a line drawn across, and under it, the shaky hospital writing.
Shane’s bedroom light bill $81. He thinks I don’t see.
Robin was talking the whole time I turned pages. She didn’t stop.
“She offered it to me. You understand that? I didn’t ask her for the house. She sat at that kitchen table and she said, Robin, I’ve got the house, let me help you. She WANTED to. The shop was going to work. It was working. I had a line out the door at Easter. Then the oven went, the big one, the convection, and do you know what that costs? Do you have any idea? And the landlord raised me two hundred a month, and the girls wanted raises, and I had Kasey in college, and what was I supposed to do, let it all go?”
“You let it all go anyway,” Ileana said.
Robin turned on her so fast Ileana stepped back into the dresser.
“YOU stay out of this. You were twenty-seven years old. You didn’t know anything about anything.”
“I was thirty-seven, Robin. I drove her to the credit union. You were at the shop. She cried the whole way home.”
“She was emotional. She was always emotional.”
“She cried because you told her it’d be paid back in two years.”
Robin looked back at me. She’d found her way around to it. I could see it on her face, the same as the counter when she’s got a customer cornered on a price.
“And you sent her money anyway. You said so yourself, you were sending it since Dad. So what’s the difference? It went to the house either way. It’s a house. It’s still standing. Nobody’s out anything.”
“The bank’s getting it,” I said.
“Because Mom couldn’t keep up. That’s not on me.”
Garland had been writing on his pad the whole time. He stopped and did some math in the margin. He did it twice. He’s a tax man.
“Fourteen payments from Robin,” he said. “Then a hundred and nineteen from Carol. That’s seventy-two thousand, eight hundred and twenty-eight dollars.” He looked at the steno pad, and then at me. “Paid, near as I can tell, mostly out of the checks marked S.”
Nobody said anything.
“That note’s a promise to pay,” Garland said. “Signed and witnessed. That makes it a debt to the estate. Shane, you’re executor. It’s your call whether it goes on the inventory as something owed.”
“You wouldn’t,” Robin said. “Shane. You would not do that. Over a pie card? You’d take your own sister to court over a PIE CARD?”
“Over her light bill.”
“She’s DEAD. What does it matter what she owed or what I owed, she’s dead, she’s in the ground since ten o’clock this morning. You want to drag my name through the probate court? You want it in the paper? I’ve got a job. I’ve got Kasey. People at that store know me.”
“People at the funeral home know me too, Robin. You made sure of it.”
“That was different. That was grief.”
“You said it so the guest line could hear.”
“Because I thought—” She stopped. She put her hand flat on her chest, like she does when she’s out of breath on the stairs. “I didn’t think it was going to be in a box. I thought she threw it out. She told me she threw it out.”
Ileana lowered the phone all the way then. She wasn’t crying. She just looked tired, the way Mom looked tired and never said.
“She told you that so you’d come to Sunday dinner,” Ileana said.
Robin went around the bed toward me. I was still on my knees by the box. She bent down and tried to take the note out of my hand.
I didn’t let go of it. I didn’t pull either. I just held on, the same way I’d held on to the lid at Mulder’s.
“Garland,” I said. “List it.”
Garland wrote it down.
Robin let go of the paper. She looked at me down there on the carpet, and then at the box, and then at the pie card lying face down by my knee.
I picked the card up and held it out to her. Pie side up.
“She said you could have it when she was dead.”
Robin looked at it a long time. Then she walked out of Mom’s bedroom and down the hall.
“You don’t have a sister anymore,” she said, and the front door shut.
The second Sunday in December
The credit union sent the letter the week before Thanksgiving. Garland called to read it to me over the phone, because he figured I’d rather hear it from him.
The house goes up for sale in January. The estate’s claim on Robin is in the file at the courthouse, where anybody can read it. Garland says it’ll be a long time before anything comes of it, if anything does. I told him that was fine. Mom waited longer.
I’ve got a room lined up over on Wheeling Avenue. It’s got a stove.
Ileana sent the video from Mom’s bedroom to the choir. I didn’t ask her to. She told me afterwards, on the phone, that she’d sent Monday night’s to them too, back when Robin asked her to, and she figured they ought to have the rest of it.
Robin hasn’t called. Her counter on the bypass still sells a buttermilk pie. I saw it through the glass when I bought paper towels. Same thick crust.
She left the card on Mom’s bed that day. I put it back in the tin.
The second Sunday in December the church did its Christmas supper in the basement. Same folding tables. Same paper tablecloths. Mrs. Lewandowski called on the Thursday to ask if somebody from Carol’s family was bringing the pie.
So on Saturday night I made it.
I’d never done it before. I had the card propped against the sugar canister, and it kept falling over, so I held it flat on the counter with my thumb while I measured the buttermilk. Three eggs. That loopy B.
The crust came out ugly. I patched it with a fork.
The steno pads are in a box in the back bedroom with my gloves. The index card from the lid is in my wallet, behind my license.
Sunday night I carried the pie down the basement stairs at church with both hands. Mrs. Lewandowski met me at the bottom and took the plate and looked at the crust.
“It’s mostly patience,” I said, and she set it in the middle of the table.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has a parent’s tin by the stove.
For more stories about family wounds surfacing in painful public moments, read about the plate sent to the bus tub and the letters from a man who never called her Judge. For another tense standoff, there’s the stranger at the bumper.
