I drew it out, read the first line, and had to set the whole box down, because it was not Cletus’s handwriting. It was my mother’s.
My mother has been dead since November of 1994.
Two pages, both sides, on the lined tablet paper she kept by the phone, and it starts Sweet girl, if Cletus has finally given you this then I have been gone a good while and you have quit being mad at everybody, which took your daddy about four years, so I am figuring on four.
Four years. She was off by twenty-seven.
She wrote it in the hospital in Bowling Green nine days before she died and she gave it to my husband in the hallway and asked him to hold onto it until I could read it without it hurting me worse. And Cletus, who never in his life could tell when a thing was ready — Cletus, who once waited two weeks to tell me the transmission was gone — carried that letter around in a coffee can in the garage for twenty-nine years waiting on a moment that he could not identify.
What he finally figured out was that he was never going to know the moment, so he’d have to build one.
The recipe box was not from a flea market, or it was, but not the way he let me think. Stapled inside the lid was a receipt from an estate sale over in Elizabethtown, and a lot tag, and a phone number for a woman named Junie. I called her. She’s seventy-eight and she runs sales all over that county and she remembered him plain as day, because a man came in and went straight to a table of kitchen things and picked up a box of somebody’s recipe cards and started reading them and then had to go sit down in his truck.
Those cards are in my mother’s mother’s hand. My grandmother’s box, sold out of my aunt’s house in 2011 with everything else, gone into the world, and my husband found it on a folding table forty miles away.
He didn’t tell me. He wrapped it up and handed it to me and said not one word about any of it, and I looked at that scratched-up lid and heard a man telling me where a wife belongs, and I put it in a cabinet.
Three weeks later he was gone at the supper table.
The cornbread card is in there. Not his mother’s — mine. My grandmother’s, dated 1961 in pencil, with the note about the skillet in the corner that I have been trying to remember for thirty years.
I read my mother’s letter on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and I read it eleven more times that week. She tells me she is not scared. She tells me to quit fighting with my brother about the house. And on the last page she says the thing I needed at forty-three and did not get until seventy, which is that she was proud of me and that she should have said it while she had a voice for it.
The box sits out on the counter now. I make the cornbread in the skillet the way the card says, and I have started writing on the back of my own cards, dates and who was there, because a woman’s handwriting outlives her and I would like mine to say something useful.