Colt lifted the lid.
Twelve brown eggs. Every one wiped clean. Every one set in with the small end down, the way Mom always did.
“A hen goes off laying when you move her,” Mr. Zeller said. “They gave me four the first day and three the second. It took until about four o’clock this afternoon to make the dozen. And I was not going to hand Rosalie’s daughter eleven eggs.”
I’m not a woman who cries in front of people.
I’d gotten through the visitation and the service and the cemetery with a dry handkerchief.
I cried in that old man’s yard until my son put his arm around me.
He’s taller than I am now. I hadn’t noticed until that very minute.
Mr. Zeller had the twelve hens penned by themselves, with fresh straw and their own waterer. He’d cut air holes in three apple boxes. He lifted the last hen out himself and held her a moment before he handed her to Colt.
A big old Barred Rock. Gray as a rainy day. Her red leg band had faded so much it was nearly pink.
“This one’s no layer,” he said. “I expect you know that.”
“That’s Pearl,” Colt said. His voice cracked on it. “You got Pearl.”
“I got her first,” Mr. Zeller said. “Nobody was going to want her for anything but the pot.”
I asked him to come Saturday. I told him there’d be coffee.
He said he’d think about it. Which, from a man like that, means yes.
Thirty-one hens went to roost in my mother’s coop that night.
Pearl took her place at the end by the window, where she’s slept since Colt was in second grade.
Friday morning, I went out to the back porch to see about the eggs.
Mom kept a second icebox out there. An old round-shouldered one that hummed. That was where the egg business lived. It was the only thing in that whole house Lucille hadn’t scrubbed.
I opened it.
Fourteen cartons, stacked two deep. And beside them, the bowl of loose eggs Colt had gathered since.
Mom had packed those cartons the Thursday she died. For the Saturday she didn’t live to see.
Every lid had a name on it, in fresh pencil. Pavlik, 2 doz. Schmidt. Pastor. The school cook. Fourteen names, in the same handwriting that had signed my report cards.
There was a fifteenth carton on the door shelf. Off by itself.
I heard Lucille come out behind me.
She had her car keys in her hand and her good coat on. I understood that she’d been about to tell me she was going home to Lincoln.
I didn’t say anything.
I took the fifteenth carton off the shelf, and I held it so she could read the lid.
Lu. Sunday. No excuses.
My aunt sat down on the porch step like somebody had cut her strings.
“I wasn’t coming,” she said.
I waited.
“She asked me for last Sunday, and I told her I had a hair appointment Saturday and didn’t feel up to the drive. It’s fifty miles, Annette. It’s fifty miles on a good road.”
She was looking at the carton. Not at me.
“And she said, then come this Sunday. And I said I’d see. I’d already thought up what I was going to tell her. I had it ready.”
“Aunt Lucille.”
“She packed me eggs. I told her for thirty years that store eggs were good enough for me. And she packed me eggs every single time. And I’d get them home, and they’d sit there until I threw them out.”
Her mouth wasn’t working right.
“I can’t sit down in this house. Do you understand me? If I’m scrubbing something, I’m not sitting in it. I thought if I could just get it emptied out, it would quit being hers.”
I sat down on the step beside her. The boards were cold.
I had a speech ready. I’d worked on it in the truck, driving between farms. Every word in it was true.
I looked at my mother’s sister, seventy-eight years old in her good coat, holding a carton of eggs she’d been too busy to come get. And I found I couldn’t say any of it.
Kim Kroeker had seen in five minutes, on her own front step, what I hadn’t let myself see in five days.
But I didn’t tell her it was all right, either. Because it wasn’t.
“I have thirty-one of them back,” I said. “Nine are gone, and I may never find them. Tomorrow is Saturday. Mom’s customers are coming to that door at eight o’clock like they have every Saturday since I was twelve. And they’ve all heard what happened, because I put it on the radio.”
I kept my voice even.
“I’m not going to tell them who sold her hens. I’m not going to tell them anything. You can be in Lincoln by then. Or you can be standing at that door handing out the last eggs she packed. I’d rather you were at the door. But that’s yours to decide.”
She didn’t answer right away.
“What about the realtor?” I said.
“I called her at seven this morning.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, hard, the way Mom used to. “I told her I’d spoken out of turn and the place wasn’t mine to list. She was very nice about it.”
Then she put her car keys in her coat pocket.
Saturday came up clear and cold. There was frost on the truck and a meadowlark singing on the fence post.
Lucille was dressed by six.
She had on Mom’s apron again. But there was no bucket this time, and no rubber gloves. She’d set the fourteen cartons out on the kitchen table in two rows, with the names facing the door. She had Lu’s carton off to one side, by the sugar bowl. She kept touching it.
The first car pulled in at ten minutes to eight.
I stood back by the stove with my coffee. And I let my aunt open that door.
It was the school cook. She had two empty cartons in her hand, the way they all did. Because you didn’t come for Rosalie’s eggs without bringing your empties back.
“I’m Lucille,” my aunt said. “I’m Rosalie’s sister. I’m the one who sold her hens. I thought I was helping, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry for it. These are yours. She packed them herself.”
The school cook looked at her.
Then she looked down at the name on the lid. In pencil. In a dead woman’s hand.
And she pressed that carton against her chest.
“Well,” she said. “Then I’m glad you’re the one handing it to me.”
Lucille said it fourteen times that morning.
She said it to every single one of them. The whole thing. She didn’t shorten it, and she didn’t dress it up.
Some of them were kind about it. One old farmer took his eggs, said “Two dollars,” shook his head, and walked back to his pickup without another word.
She stood there and took that too.
The empty cartons piled up on the counter. Thirty, forty of them. Soft as cloth at the corners. Every lid gray with my mother’s pencil. Years and years of Saturdays.
When there was a gap between cars, Lucille started reading them. She’d pick one up and tip it toward the window.
“She wrote the weather on this one,” she said once. “Twenty below. Left on your porch, do not come out.”
Mr. Zeller came at nine.
He’d shaved.
He drank one cup of coffee standing up and told Lucille, very gravely, that he was the fellow she’d thought was hard of hearing.
And she laughed. The first time I’d heard her laugh all week.
Nobody would take their eggs for nothing. I want that written down. I told every one of them there was no charge. And every one of them walked right around me and put three dollars in the coffee can anyway.
A little after ten, a tan Buick came up the lane at about four miles an hour.
It was Mrs. Pavlik.
She’s eighty-four. She’d been buying two dozen a week since the summer Mom started.
She didn’t stop at the house. She stopped right in front of the coop. She rolled down her window.
“Annette,” she said, “come and get these birds out of my automobile before they ruin the upholstery.”
There were two apple boxes on her back seat. And a laundry basket with a bath towel clothespinned over the top.
The towel was moving.
Nine hens.
“I’ve been on the telephone since Wednesday noon,” Mrs. Pavlik said, while Colt and Dale carried them out two at a time in the dog crate. “I have the church directory, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
She ticked them off on her fingers.
“A couple by the lake had four. The Schmidt girl’s neighbor had three. Two went to a man who was fixing to butcher them this very weekend. I told him I’d pray for him. He didn’t care for my tone.”
She sniffed.
“Count the legs. They’ve all got her bands.”
They did. Green and blue and yellow. Every one.
Forty.
I got the coffee can. By my count, I owed her twenty-seven dollars. I started counting it out.
“You put that away,” she said. Just exactly like Mr. Zeller.
“I broke my hip in the winter of ninety-eight. Your mother carried eggs up my back steps for two winters. And shoveled them first. I’ve owed that woman a good deal more than twenty-seven dollars for a long time.”
She looked past me, toward the kitchen door. Lucille was standing there with a dish towel in her hands.
“Is that the sister?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Send her out here.”
Lucille came. She came the whole way across the yard and stood beside the Buick window with her back straight. And she started in on her fourteen-times sentence.
Mrs. Pavlik lifted one finger off the steering wheel.
“I heard. Everybody has heard.”
She wasn’t unkind. But she didn’t soften it either.
“You sold thirty-five years of that woman’s mornings for the price of a loaf of bread apiece. I want you to know that I know it.”
“Yes,” Lucille said.
“Good. Now. I was the oldest of seven, and I buried a sister myself. I cleaned her house out in four days flat, and I gave away a quilt I’ve wanted back for twenty years. So I know something about that too.”
She put the Buick in gear.
“I take two dozen. I like them candled. Rosalie always candled mine. I’ll expect them next Saturday.”
And she backed that car all the way down the lane. Because she has never in her life learned to turn around in a farmyard.
Lucille watched her go.
“What’s candled?” she said.
So I showed her.
Dad built Mom’s candler out of a wooden box, with a sixty-watt bulb inside and a hole in the top about the size of a quarter. You take it in the pantry and shut the door, because brown eggs are hard to see through and you want it good and dark. You set the big end of the egg against the hole, and you turn it slowly.
“That bright place at the top is the air cell,” I told her. “Small is fresh. If you see a line like a hair, that’s a crack, and it goes in the house bowl, not in a carton. A dark speck, same thing. She never sold an egg she hadn’t looked through.”
My aunt held an egg up to the light in the dark of her sister’s pantry.
The shelves around us were bare. Wiped down to the wood. Neither one of us said a word about it.
“I can see it,” she whispered. “Annette, I can see right inside it.”
She set it in a carton. Small end down. Without being told.
