I lifted the lid at Dolores end of the table, with Pat sitting where the kids used to sit, and inside were recipe cards, dozens of them, every one in my wifes round schoolteacher hand.
Not her recipes. Mine. Or what she wanted to be mine. The pierogi, of course, but also the simple things, eggs, how long to boil a potato, how to make the coffee the way I liked it without her, each card written plain, like she was teaching a child, because she knew that without her that is exactly what I would be at the stove.
On the back of each card she had written something. On the eggs card it said, low heat, Eddie, you always rush. On the pierogi card it said, make these every Christmas Eve, even for just the kids, so they remember. On the coffee card it said, two scoops, not three, you are not as young as your stomach thinks.
The most honest woman in Lackawanna County had spent her last well years secretly writing me a cookbook of our whole life, not because she was hiding a thing from me, but because she could not stand the thought of me hungry and lost in her kitchen after she was gone.
And at the bottom, under all the cards, was the letter. She told me she had gotten her diagnosis a long time before she told me, that she had spent that stolen private year not crying but cooking and writing, so that I would be all right. She did not want the kids to see the box because she did not want them to know how long she had carried it alone, protecting all of us from the worry.
The last card was not a recipe. It said, when you have made it through one whole year of feeding yourself, take a woman to dinner, Eddie. Not to replace me. Because you are a man who does better with someone across the table, and I would rather you be happy than faithful to an empty chair.
It took me eleven days to learn to make eggs without burning them. It has taken me longer than a year to be ready for that last card. But I make the pierogi every Christmas Eve now, for the kids and the grandkids, from her card, in her hand, and every one of them tastes like being taken care of by a woman who thought of everything.