The shelves were bare.
I stood at the bottom of Mama’s cellar steps with my hand still on the light string and looked at them, all five rows, floor to joist, the plank shelves my father built in 1961 out of barn siding. Nine days earlier we had buried her. Three weeks before that, she and I had filled the last gap on the bottom row with applesauce.
Now there was nothing on those boards but rings in the dust. Hundreds of rings, each the size of a jar bottom, in rows as straight as the lines in a hymnal.
The cellar still smelled the way it always had, of cold limestone and old apples. But it sounded different. A full cellar is quiet in a thick way, like a room with a rug in it. An empty one gives your own breathing back to you.
I counted the rings on one shelf, because counting is what I do when I can’t think. I have kept the books at the lumberyard three mornings a week for twenty-two years. Sixty to a shelf, near enough. Five shelves.
Three hundred. I knew the number already. I had chalked it on the door frame myself on the twenty-second of August, under forty years of other Augusts, while Mama sat on the third step and told me I made my sevens like a Lutheran, plain, with no cross on them.
I had found out an hour before, in the church parking lot. Shirley Peterson, who is eighty-three and walks with a cane she pretends is for show, caught my sleeve after the second service to thank me for two jars of my mother’s pear butter.
“At the market yesterday,” she said. “Your brother’s table. Four dollars. I told Pam that’s a sin, it ought to be eight. But it’s a comfort, Judy. Having something of Lorraine’s in the cupboard.”
I told her I was glad she had it. I meant that. Then I told Hank I would be a few minutes, and I drove out the gravel to the home place with my church shoes still on.
Mama’s house sits a half mile past my brother’s. Dennis has had a key since Dad died. So have I. It had not occurred to me in sixty-one years that one of us might use it without telling the other.
The peaches were what I kept thinking about. Every August Mama and I bought two lugs off the peach truck from Missouri and did them in one long day, her peeling and me packing. This August she was eighty-six, and she still peeled every one. Twenty-eight quarts.
Half the lids in that cellar were in my hand. The other half were in hers, a little shakier every summer, and I could have told you which were which from across the room.
I let the slanted door down behind me and drove the half mile.
Pam came to the door with a dish towel over her shoulder. She is fifty-seven, a small quick woman who has worked the register at the farm store for thirty years. She looked at my face and knew why I had come.
“You’ve been out to the house,” she said.
“I’ve been down cellar.”
“Come in, then. Don’t stand on the step letting the flies in.”
Dennis was at the table with the Sunday paper and a cup of coffee. My brother is fifty-eight and has driven the feed truck for the co-op since he was twenty. He did not get up. He turned a page.
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