be gone. And I’d be alone again.” She looked at the freezer, still open, cold rolling out of it. “So I just kept it. All of it. Every one. And then I’d come home and eat toast.”
I sat there beside my mother-in-law on her laundry room floor with a hundred frozen dinners around us.
“And on Thursday,” I said. “With Jonah.”
She closed her eyes.
“I was filling my containers,” she said. “And I looked over and there he was. With his plate. In his green shirt. Waiting. Just like I used to wait.” She shook her head. “And I heard my mother’s voice
come out of my mouth. Kids eat last in this family. And he said, Okay, Grandma.”
She put her face in her hands.
“He said okay,” she whispered. “He believed me. Just like I believed her.”
Chapter Eight: The Mail
I put Cliff’s plate back.
At the bottom of the freezer. In the corner. Where it was. She watched me do it.
Then I started putting the others back on top. One at a time. Easter. Christmas. Birthdays.
“Molly,” she said. “Leave them out.”
I stopped.
“Leave them out,” she said again. “I don’t want to put them back. I want…” She stopped. “I don’t know what I want.”
I made coffee in her kitchen. In her old Mr. Coffee. We sat at her table. The one Cliff bought at the
Kimball employee store in 1981.
There was a basket on the corner of the table. A wicker one, piled high with mail. Unopened. Envelopes from Social Security. From the Kimball retiree benefits office. From German American Bank,
where I work. From an insurance company I didn’t recognize.
“Bernadine,” I said. “What’s all this?”
She looked at the basket.
“Cliff did the money,” she said. “Fifty years. I never wrote a check. I never looked at a statement. When he died, they kept sending things. I didn’t know what they were.” She shook her head. “I was afraid to open them. I thought they’d say I was broke.”
“Do you think you’re broke?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I have. I live on what comes into the checking account every month. I don’t spend anything. I buy soup and bread. I turn the heat down to sixty-two.” She
looked at me. “I’ve been so scared, Molly. Every month. That it’ll run out.”
I work behind the member services desk at a bank. I open statements for a living. I explain them to scared people every single day.
“Can I look?” I asked.
She hesitated. Then she pushed the basket across the table to me.
It took me two hours.
I opened every envelope. I sorted them into piles on her kitchen table. Social Security. Pension. Bank. Insurance. Taxes. Junk.
I added it all up on the back of a church bulletin with a ballpoint pen.
Then I turned the bulletin around and showed her.
“Your Social Security survivor’s benefit,” I said. “It’s eighteen hundred and ninety a month. That’s Cliff’s full benefit. You get it now instead of your own, because his was bigger.”
She nodded slowly.
“Cliff’s Kimball pension,” I said. “He took the joint and survivor option when he retired. That means you get it for life. Eleven hundred and forty a month.”
She stared at me.
“Your house is paid off,” I said. “Your property taxes are paid out of escrow at the bank. Your car’s paid off. You’ve got eighty-six thousand dollars in savings at German American. Cliff’s IRA rolled over to
you. It’s sitting there earning interest.”
Bernadine didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I’m not broke,” she said finally.
“You’re not broke, Bernadine,” I said. “Not even close. You can afford to buy groceries. You can afford to turn the heat up. You can afford to go out to eat with the euchre ladies.”
She put her hand over her mouth.
“There’s one more thing,” I said.
I picked up an envelope from the bottom of the basket. From an insurance company in Des Moines. It had been opened once and stuffed back in. Dated eighteen months ago.
“This is from a group life insurance policy,” I said. “Through Cliff’s union at Kimball. The Carpenters’ union. It says they’re trying to reach the beneficiary.” I looked up at her. “That’s you. There’s a twenty-five-thousand-dollar death benefit. You never claimed it.”
Bernadine stared at the envelope.
“I thought it was a bill,” she said.
“It’s not a bill,” I said. “It’s twenty-five thousand dollars. Cliff left it for you.”
She started laughing. Then crying. Then laughing again. She put her face in her hands at her own kitchen table and shook.
“Three years,” she said. “Three years I’ve been eating toast. Three years I’ve been taking food home
from my children’s tables because I thought I’d go hungry.”
“I know.”
“And it was here,” she said. “All of it. In a basket. On my table.”
She looked up at me.
“Cliff always said I’d never have to worry about money,” she said. “He said, Bernie, I’ve got it all set up. You’ll never be hungry again. I promise.” Her voice broke. “And I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe
him for one second. Because I’d been hungry for fifty years and I didn’t know how to stop.”
Chapter Nine: Neil
Neil came over that evening.
I called him from Bernadine’s kitchen and told him to come. I didn’t tell him why. I just said, “Your mother needs you.”
He was there in twenty minutes. He came in the front door in his Kimball jacket. He found us in the
laundry room.
He stopped in the doorway.
He looked at the containers. Stacked on the dryer. On the washer. On the floor. A hundred little
masking-tape labels.
He looked at the freezer, open, almost empty.
He looked at his mother.
“Mom,” he said. “What is all this?”
She told him. All of it. Standing in the laundry room in her church dress with her coat off. Her childhood. The wings and the backs. Cliff fixing the kids’ plates. The day he died. The containers.
Neil didn’t say anything. He just listened.
When she got to Cliff’s plate, she walked over to the freezer and reached down to the very bottom and brought it up.
She held it out to him.
Neil looked at it for a long time.
THANKSGIVING 2022. CLIFF’S PLATE.
He took it from her. He held it in both hands. His father’s hands.
“You saved it,” he said.
“I couldn’t throw it away,” she whispered.
He looked down at it. Through the cloudy plastic. At the corner of dressing. Brown on two edges.
“He always took the corner,” Neil said. “When I was little. Every holiday. He’d fix our plates and then he’d fix his and he’d always take the corner. And I’d get mad.” He almost smiled. “And then when I was about Jonah’s age, he started giving me the corner. Every year. He’d fix my plate first and put the
corner on it and he wouldn’t say anything.”
He looked at his mother.
“I never knew,” he said, “that he was giving it up for me.”
Bernadine reached out. She put her hand on his arm.
“He’d give up anything for you kids,” she said. “Anything. He used to say, Bernie, I’ll eat last forever, if it means they never have to.”
Neil put the container down on the dryer. Very carefully. He turned around. He put his arms around his mother.
She held on to him. Five foot two and six foot three. In the laundry room. Surrounded by three years
of frozen dinners.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Neil said into her hair. “For what I said. At Thanksgiving. In front of everybody.”
“You were right,” she said into his chest.
“I know,” Neil said. “But I’m still sorry.”
We cleaned out the freezer that night. All three of us.
Most of it had to go. Three years is too long, even frozen. Freezer burn on the turkey. Ice crystals in the potatoes. Renee would know, she’s a nurse. Neil called her. She came over at seven with garbage
bags and her reading glasses.
She took one look at the laundry room and sat down on the floor and cried.
Then she got up and helped.
We sorted them. The ones from this year that still looked good, we stacked on the counter. Bernadine would eat them this week. She promised.
The rest went in garbage bags. One container at a time. Bernadine read each label out loud before it
went in the bag.
“Easter 2023. Renee’s. Ham.”
“Fourth of July 2023. Neil’s. Corn.”
“Jonah’s birthday. 2024. Cake.”
Like she was saying goodbye to each one.
When we got to the bottom, there was only one left.
Cliff’s plate.
Bernadine picked it up. She held it for a long time.
“I don’t know what to do with this one,” she said.
Nobody said anything.
Then Neil said, “Mom. Do you want to take it to him?”
So on Monday morning, we did.
St. Joseph Cemetery. On the hill above Jasper, behind the church. Cliff’s grave is in the newer section, by an oak tree. A gray granite headstone with a carpenter’s square carved on it, for his union.
CLIFFORD J. SCHNELL. 1955 to 2022. BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER.
Bernadine stood in front of it in her good coat, holding the container.
Neil and Renee and I stood behind her. And Jonah. Jonah came too. He insisted.
She didn’t open it. She didn’t bury it. She just knelt down on the cold grass in front of his headstone and set it there. At the base. Next to the little pot of mums Renee brought for Halloween.
“I fixed your plate, Cliff,” she said. Very quietly. “Like I always do. You’ve just got to eat it now. I can’t hold onto it anymore.”
She stayed there on her knees for a long time.
Then she stood up. She picked the container back up. She held it against her chest.
She walked to the trash can by the cemetery gate, and she set it inside. Gently. The way you’d lay something down in a casket.
Then she turned around and walked back to us.
Chapter Ten: Christmas
She came to Christmas.
At our house. Outside Ferdinand. Fourteen people again. Same chairs. Same table with the leaf in. Same card table, which Neil dug out of the garage two days early this time.
She came at noon. She brought her canvas tote bag.
My stomach dropped when I saw it.
She set it on the kitchen counter. She didn’t open it.
She took off her coat and hung it on the hook. She came into the kitchen. I was basting the ham. She
stood beside me at the stove.
“What can I do?” she asked.
I looked at her. In her red Christmas sweater with the reindeer on it. She’d gotten her hair done.
She’d gained a little weight. Her cheeks had color.
“You could mash the potatoes,” I said. “Jonah peeled them.”
“Forty-six of them,” Jonah announced from the kitchen table. “I counted.”
She mashed the potatoes. With my old hand masher, standing at the stove. She put in too much butter. Way too much. Neil’s family puts in too much butter. It’s a Schnell thing.
When everything was ready, at two o’clock, I set it all out on the counter. The ham. The potatoes. The green bean casserole. The dressing. The rolls. Pie and cookies and my persimmon pudding.
Everybody was seated at the big table. The kids hovering behind their chairs.
I reached for the first plate.
Bernadine put her hand on mine.
“Let me,” she said.
I looked at her.
She took the plate out of my hand. She turned to the doorway. To the dining room.
“Jonah,” she said. “Come here, honey.”
He came. In his red Christmas sweater, which matched hers. He stood beside her at the counter.
“Hold your plate up,” she said.
He held it up.
She took the carving fork and put two good slices of ham on it. From the center. The best part.
Then mashed potatoes, his potatoes, with a puddle of gravy.
Green beans. A roll, with butter.
Then she went to the dressing. And she cut the corner. The crusty corner, brown on two edges.
She put it on his plate.
“That’s my corner, Grandma,” Jonah said, delighted.
“I know,” Bernadine said. “Your grandpa used to give it to your daddy. Now I’m giving it to you.”
She put a square of persimmon pudding on the edge of his plate. The corner piece. Because she
knew he’d eat that first.
“Go sit down and eat while it’s hot,” she said.
He went. At the big table. In her chair at the head. He ate the pudding first.
Then she fixed Emma’s plate. And Harper’s. And Cody’s. And Tucker’s. Every kid. One at a time. She called each one to the counter and fixed their plate and sent them to the table.
The grown-ups sat at the big table and watched her.
Nobody said a word.
When the last kid was seated, Bernadine set down the carving fork. She looked at the table. At all the kids eating. At Jonah at the head, with gravy on his chin.
Then she turned to the grown-ups.
“All right,” she said. “Now the rest of you. Line up.”
At the end of the night, when everybody was getting their coats, Bernadine went to the counter and opened her canvas tote bag.
My stomach dropped again.
She took out containers. The heavy-duty kind. Eight of them.
She filled them. Ham. Potatoes. Green beans. Dressing. Pie.
Then she turned around and handed them out. One to Renee. One to Lisa. One to Gary and Pat. One to Doug. One to Lisa’s boyfriend, whose name I still can’t remember.
“For your lunches this week,” she said. “Take it. There’s plenty.”
She handed one to me.
I looked at it. Ham and dressing and a slice of pecan pie.
Then she reached into the tote bag one more time. She took out a stack of plastic lids.
She held out the first one to me.
I took it. People do.
Then the second. The third. The fourth.
I stood in my kitchen holding four lids.
Bernadine looked at me. And for the first time in the eleven years I’d known her, she laughed. Really laughed. With her whole face.
“Turnabout’s fair play, Molly,” she said.
Chapter Eleven: The Freezer
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