I didn’t see who left it. I turned from handing a card to someone, and there it was at the corner of the red cloth: a quart jar, clean, upside down on its mouth the way you set them to drain, with the ring screwed on loose.
Hank picked it up and held it to the light. “Washed,” he said.
Then four more, in a paper sack. Word goes around a square fast. People who had bought from Pam the Saturday before went home and got the glass.
And then it was not only last week’s jars. It was the old ones. People who lived close walked home and came back with jars from under their sinks and the backs of their cupboards, from last winter and the winter before. They set them down on the cloth like people settling up.
By half past ten there were thirty-one empty jars on my table and in the grass around it. I counted. Hank had gone to the pickup for a crate.
That was when Shirley Peterson came across the lawn.
She was coming slow, with the cane, and she had her big black pocketbook over her arm and something held against her chest in both hands. The people at the table made room for her without being asked.
It was a half-pint jar. The old style, with the quilted pattern in the glass. Clean as a communion cup.
She set it on the red cloth right in front of the tin box and kept two fingers on it.
“Your mother left this on my back step in October of 2009,” she said. “The week I buried Harold. Four of them, and a loaf of bread, and no note. She didn’t need a note. I knew whose jars they were.”
“Shirley.”
“I ate three and gave the jars back. I know the rule.” Her chin was not steady. “I never could eat the fourth. I kept it in the door of the refrigerator four years because it was the last thing anybody brought. Then I finally ate it, on toast, on his birthday, and I washed the jar. And then I couldn’t bring that back either.” She looked down at it. “Going on seventeen years I’ve had Lorraine’s jar. I’d see her in church and think, Shirley, you thief.”
“She knew where it was,” I said. “She’d never have asked.”
“I know she wouldn’t. That’s why I’m bringing it.” She took her fingers off the glass. “I bought two of that pear butter last Saturday for four dollars apiece, and it’s sat wrong with me all week and I couldn’t think why. Now I know why. I never paid for one of her jars in my life, and I had no business starting after she was gone.”
I could not answer her. I looked up into the maples for a while. Hank put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and left it there, and it was the only thing holding me up.
When I could see again, I took a pear butter card off the stack and gave it to her.
Shirley read it. She got to the margin.
“For new widows,” she said. “Double it.” She pressed the card against the front of her coat. “Well. I’m not new anymore. But I can still stir.”
“I’ll bring you pears,” I said.
“You bring me pears,” said Shirley Peterson, “and I’ll show you I haven’t forgotten how.”
I had not looked at space thirteen in an hour. I looked now.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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