Down in that compartment, lined with oilcloth and packed tight, was a wooden recipe box. The old kind, pine, with a sliding lid. Beside it was a spiral notebook with a cracked cover and a flour sack towel folded on top.
The box was full. Hundreds of index cards, every one in the same looping handwriting. Apple stack cake. Pepperoni rolls. Buttermilk pie. Soup beans with ham hock. Some cards were stained so dark you could barely read them. Some had notes in the margins. Too much salt. Doubled for the Hensley funeral. Pastor liked this one.
The note on top of the notebook said, For whoever cooks in this kitchen next. These fed this town for forty years. Do not let them die with me. Opal Riffle, 1998.
I called the couple in. Their names were Hannah and Luke. They were both teachers at the college in Glenville and had bought the house that spring. Hannah read the note and said, Opal Riffle. I have heard that name.
A woman who fed a whole town had sealed her life inside a kitchen counter so it would outlast her.
Everybody over fifty in Glenville had heard that name. Opal Riffle cooked for the Methodist church for four decades. Every funeral dinner. Every homecoming. Every family that lost a job or a husband or a house fire got a covered dish from Opal on their porch the next morning. She never took a dime. She died in 2001.
Hannah took the recipe box to the church that Sunday. The women in the kitchen there were the daughters and granddaughters of the women who had cooked with Opal. One of them, a woman named Betty, picked up the card for apple stack cake and started crying right there by the coffee urn. She said she had been trying to make that cake from memory for twenty years and could never get it right.
It turned out the secret was dried apples cooked down with sorghum. Opal had written it right there in the margin.
The church women spent the whole winter typing up every card. Hannah and Luke paid to have them printed. In the spring, the church sold a spiral bound cookbook at the county fair. They called it Opal. They printed four hundred copies. They sold out in two days.
Every dollar went to a fund Betty set up in the name of Opal, to take meals to families in hard times. Same as she did.
I set the new stone counters in two weeks. Hannah asked me to build one drawer into the base cabinet where the compartment had been. She keeps the original recipe box in it now. The church has a copy of everything, but Hannah says the real cards should stay in the kitchen where Opal wanted them.
At the end of the job, Hannah handed me a plate covered in foil. Apple stack cake, from the card. Seven thin layers.
It was the best thing I ate all year.
Twenty one years setting tops. That is the first counter I ever built to hold something more important than a coffee pot.