Jenna set the white envelope down, and her hand was shaking. “Leo, I do not understand. Why would a soda company send you a letter?” “Because I sold them my root beer recipe, Jenna,” I said. “The one I stirred in a copper kettle in the back of the drugstore for forty years, with sassafras and vanilla and a pinch of anise. They paid me six million two hundred thousand dollars in the spring.” I took a deep breath. “I did not tell any of you, because I wanted to see how my own family would treat an old man they thought had only a spare room and a recipe card.”
Kurt had gone the color of paste. “Dad, you do not understand how it works. The royalty checks were going into a joint account.” “Six checks, son,” I said. “Sixty seven thousand dollars. They were mailed from the publisher to the cookbook of your mother, titled Iowa Kitchen, which was printed in nineteen eighty four and is now in its fourteenth printing. Every one of those checks was endorsed by someone using a very fair copy of my signature, and deposited in an account that ends in six six one zero. Lily showed me the payments. They paid for your boat and for those ridiculous tickets.” Jenna stared at her husband as if she had never seen him.
The room was so quiet that I could hear the barge horn sounding on the Mississippi, a long, low note that I had loved since boyhood. Jenna spoke first. “Kurt, you told me the boat came from the estate of your uncle. You promised.” “Jenna, I meant to tell you,” Kurt began. I opened the cover of the cookbook of Agnes, the first copy off the press, with her careful handwriting on the inside page. It said, For Leo, who eats everything I make and still says thank you. I laid it open on the table where everyone could see, and I let Agnes say the rest.
A cookbook with a handwritten note inside the cover gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the kitchen table in Dubuque.
I kept my voice as even as the river on a still morning. “Here is what happens now. You will repay all sixty seven thousand dollars, and you will do it in payments that I will set, from your own paycheck. You will sell the boat and put every dollar of it against the debt. You will sign a letter telling the publisher exactly what you did, and I will hold it in my safe. And I will be out of the spare room by the end of the month, because I have bought a small house on the bluff, with a fishing pond. Jenna, I will not need the brochure.”
On Saturday I drove down to the old drugstore on Main Street, where the copper kettle still sat on the back shelf, and I found a surprise waiting. The new owners had kept the soda fountain open, and a crowd had gathered, regulars who had bought a nickel root beer from me when they were children. A retired mailman named Orrin took off his cap. “Leo,” he said, “we heard that the cookbook of Agnes was taken. We have all got a copy. We have all got a recipe that came out of that book.” They had brought forty copies, and they stacked them on the counter, each one stained and well loved.
The money consequences came quickly. Kurt sold the boat at a loss of nine thousand dollars, and he had to take a second job at a plant in Asbury to pay down the debt. Jenna opened her own account, and she took over the bills. The publisher, a fair and decent house in Des Moines, agreed not to take the matter further as long as the payments were made on time, and they sent me a kind letter. The tickets were sold, and the money was returned. For a long season, Kurt could not sit in a restaurant without looking at the prices on the menu first.
I wanted something good to grow from the bad. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of Agnes. The Agnes Kerper Kitchen Fund pays for cooking classes, aprons and knife sets for any young person in Dubuque County who wants to learn the trade and cannot afford it. We held the first class in the church basement on a rainy Saturday. Sixteen teenagers peeled potatoes and burned two pans of biscuits, and every one of them went home smelling like butter. I thought about Agnes the whole time, humming and flour up to her elbows.
Jenna came to see me at the new house a week after I moved in. She brought a casserole and a bag of fresh rolls, and she stood in the doorway looking at the pond through the window. She told me she was sorry she had slid that brochure across the table, and sorrier still that she had believed a story she should have questioned. I told her she was a good woman, and that being fooled by someone you love is not a crime. We sat on the porch with iced tea, and a heron landed on the far bank, and neither of us said a word for a while.
Kurt took the longest. For three months he did not call. Then one Sunday morning I found him on my porch with his hat in his hands, holding the first payment in an envelope. He told me he had been ashamed to look at me, because every time he saw a cookbook he heard his mother. I said that Agnes would have forgiven him before the sun went down. Then I handed him a wooden spoon and led him into my little kitchen, and I taught him to make the root beer, step by step, the way my father had taught me.
In the fall, we all gathered at the pond for a picnic. Jenna brought potato salad, and the sun came down golden through the maples, and a barge horn sounded faintly from the river. Kurt stood at the stove with the old copper kettle, stirring the root beer with the wooden spoon. When it was ready, he poured me a glass over ice and held it out. I took a sip. It tasted of sassafras and vanilla and Agnes, and of a long marriage and a family finding its way home. “Well, Dad?” Kurt asked. “It needs a pinch more anise,” I said, and he laughed.