Part 9
Part 9 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I didn’t know which cookies.
That is the detail that took me apart, in the end. Not the door, not the hand, not the notebook. I got all the way to the Kroger on Wilmington that evening, and I stood at the endcap with a cart I didn’t need, and I realized I had no idea what my brother ate.
I called Patty from the aisle.
“Windmill,” she said, before I finished the question. “The Dutch ones, with the almond. Paper package, not the plastic. And don’t get the store brand, he knows.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve been buying them for eleven years, Claire. Where do you think she got them?” A pause on her end, a TV going. “She wouldn’t buy them herself. Somebody could see her. So I bought them at the Meijer in Beavercreek and I put them in her trunk.”
I stood in front of four feet of cookies in a grocery store where I have shopped since I was twenty four.
“Every week,” I said.
“Every week.”
“For eleven years you bought cookies in a different county so nobody would see my mother buying cookies.”
“Yes.”
“Aunt Patty, do you hear it? Do you hear what that sounds like when you say it out loud?”
“Yes,” she said. “Every single time.”
I put four packages in the cart. Then I took two out, because I didn’t know how fast he ate them, and then I put them back in, because what did it matter, and then I stood there with my hands on the cart handle and cried in the cookie aisle of a Kroger in front of a woman with a toddler who very kindly pretended to be reading a label.
At home Tom had made the thing he makes, chicken and rice, and Nora had a wobbly tooth she wanted everyone to look at.
“How was the lawyer?” Tom said.
“Fine. Long.”
“Anything I should know?”
My husband. Nine years. He had carried my mother’s casket in July and then stood in the receiving line for two hours, shaking hands with people who had known her longer than he had known me.
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”