It’s been a year since that Easter.
Loretta still comes every Saturday morning. She’s learned to roast a chicken. Bake a loaf of bread. Make a respectable gravy. She’s still not good, and she’d be the first one to tell you so.
But she shows up. In her gray sweater and the white apron with the blue stripe. And she tries.
On the last Saturday of every month, she drives a dish over to Marcy Dolan’s yellow house in a foil pan with a handwritten card on top.
“Made by Loretta Vance.”
She underlines the word “made.” I noticed.
Britney started a small business. A real one. A consulting practice for local restaurants, with a license and a business bank account and her own name painted on the door.
She called me in March.
“Eleanor, would it be all right if I used a photograph of your coconut cake in my portfolio?”
“With attribution?” I asked.
She laughed. “With a credit. Recipe by Eleanor M. Whitcomb.”
“Then yes.”
“And Eleanor? I don’t want to presume. But would you ever consider teaching a cooking class? For the neighborhood? I’d handle all the logistics. You’d teach. The money could go to the school lunch fund at Jefferson.”
I thought about four hundred children a day. A long line of trays. A little girl with a free-lunch stamp hidden in her pocket.
“I’d like that very much,” I said.
The class meets on Thursday nights in the basement of the Methodist church. Twelve students, mostly young couples, and one retired firefighter named Hal who takes notes like he’s studying for the bar exam. Every one of them pays $25 a class, and every dollar goes into the Jefferson Elementary lunch account to pay off kids’ meal debts. Last spring we cleared $3,100 worth.
On the very first night, I tied on my mother’s gingham apron, gravy stain and all. A young woman in the front row raised her hand.
“Mrs. Whitcomb? Is this your recipe?”
“It’s my mother’s.”
“Do you want us to give her credit?”
I looked around that church basement. At Loretta in the back row in her apron. At Britney at a folding table with a legal pad. At Garrett standing by the sink with a dish towel over his shoulder, and Clara on a stool beside him, stirring a bowl of nothing in particular.
“I’d like you to credit everyone,” I said. “Everyone who ever fed you.”
Britney got up and wrote it on the whiteboard in big letters.
CREDIT THE COOK.
I took a picture of that whiteboard. It’s on my refrigerator.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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