All stories › Fantasy › Exactly As Written › Episode 1
The Pot Roast
Episode 1 of 3 of Exactly As Written by Renee Dufresne · free to read
I put the enamel pot on the trivet and lifted the lid, and the steam rolled up into the light over the table. When it cleared, my grandmother was sitting in the fourth chair.
She had her reading glasses on a chain and her cardigan buttoned one hole off, the way she always buttoned it. She was looking at the roast.
Gretchen dropped her fork. It hit her plate and then the floor.
“Ivy,” she said, very quietly. “Ivy.”
Arlo didn’t move at all.
“You browned it in bacon fat,” Gran said. “Good. Did you put the coffee in?”
“One cup,” I said. My voice came out ordinary, which scared me more than she did. “Strong. Like the card said.”
“Nobody ever believes me about the coffee.” She held out her plate. “Ivy, honey, I’d like the end piece.”
Gretchen found the rest of her voice first. She was the oldest, and she always found it first.
“Gran,” she said. “You died. Six years ago. I picked out the casket.”
“I know, sweetheart. It was a nice one.” Gran lifted her plate an inch higher. “The end piece, please.”
I cut it for her. My hands knew how even when the rest of me didn’t. Two potatoes, three carrots, and a ladle of gravy over everything, because she liked her potatoes drowned.
“Where did you get the recipe?” Gretchen said, without taking her eyes off Gran.
“Noreen’s box.” I pointed at the dented red tin on the counter. My great-aunt had died at the end of summer, and the box came to me when they cleared her house. “It was the first card I found in Gran’s writing.”
“And you made it exactly like it says,” Gran said.
“Line by line,” I said. “I didn’t change a thing.”
“Good girl.”
Arlo finally spoke. He was thirty-three and he sounded about nine. “Are you staying?”
“As long as the meal lasts,” Gran said. “When somebody clears my plate, I go. Doesn’t matter who clears it, and the card works in any kitchen. That’s how Noreen’s box works.”
“How do you know that?” Gretchen said.
“Noreen told me, years back. She tried it once with our mother’s biscuits.” Gran took a bite of potato and closed her eyes. “Too salty. That’s my fault. I always wrote it too salty.”
We made that dinner last as long as three grown people could.
“Tell me about the kids,” Gran said, and Gretchen did, both of them, their teeth and their grades.
“I made head mechanic,” Arlo said. “At the garage.”
“You never told us that,” Gretchen said.
“I’m telling Gran.”
I warmed the rolls twice. I cut the store pie into slivers so there would be more slices to serve.
“This crust is cardboard,” Gran said, on her third sliver. It was.
Around nine she set down her fork.
“Ivy,” she said. “Clear the table, honey.”
“Not yet.”
“Your brother has work at six. Your sister has a baby who still doesn’t sleep.” She patted my wrist. Her hand was warm and a little dry, the way it had always been. “It’s all right. Start with mine.”
I couldn’t argue with her when I was eight, and I couldn’t now. I picked up her plate.
When I turned around from the sink, the fourth chair was empty. Her napkin was folded on the seat.
Gretchen made a sound I had never heard from her. Arlo put his face in his hands.
I went to the tin box. The pot roast card was white on both sides. Not faded. Blank, like it had just come out of the pack.
“Ivy,” Arlo said. “What did it say? How long did you brown it?”
“I don’t know.” I had made it that afternoon, and I could not tell him. I had never copied it down. “I remember the cup of coffee. That’s all. Her pot roast is gone.”
Inside the lid was a strip of label tape I’d seen three weeks ago and taken for a joke. Noreen had punched it out letter by letter. ONCE EACH. COUNT BEFORE YOU CHOOSE.
So I counted. Most of the box was magazine clippings and recipes cut off the backs of boxes, and anything in block capitals looked printed to me.
“There’s one more of Gran’s,” I said. “Chicken and dumplings. And one in Noreen’s print, at the very back. Tuna noodle casserole. That’s all.”
“The chicken and dumplings,” Gretchen said. “Next Sunday.”
“Why do you get to pick?” Arlo said.
“Because I sat with her at the end. You were at the lake.”
“It’s Ivy’s box.”
“There’s one card,” I said. “Please don’t fight about it tonight.”
Arlo went through the clippings anyway, one at a time, the way he used to sort his baseball cards. Near the middle he stopped.
“I know these capitals,” he said.
He had kept every birthday card our dad sent after the divorce. I’d seen them in a shoebox in his closet. Block letters, pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
Arlo held up a card in our father’s handwriting.