Sundays
A fifth short story, attached. Two sisters eat through their mother's chest freezer after she dies, two tubs every Sunday from April to November, and one tub labelled only with a question mark keeps getting put back on top. One sister counts and the other doesn't, and the story doesn't choose between them. On the cold read the fixes were about where things are: a tub that couldn't have stayed hidden until July in the layer where I'd put it, and a kitchen that was emptier in one sentence than in the next.
Sundays
Their mother's chest freezer stood in the garage against the wall where the car would have gone, if she had ever once put the car in the garage. When Dana lifted the lid, the week after the funeral, the cold came up over the rim and spilled onto her shoes.
"Oh, no," said Tess, behind her.
It was full. It wasn't full the way a freezer usually is, with peas and ice trays and a turkey nobody remembers buying. It was full like a cellar in a fairy tale. There were margarine tubs and yogurt tubs and deli containers with snap lids, stacked in rows. Each one had a strip of masking tape and their mother's capitals in black marker. CHILI. CHILI (HOT). BEAN. HAM BONE. PESTO — YARD BASIL. STOCK. STOCK. STOCK.
"She was cooking for an army," Tess said.
"She was cooking for one," said Dana. "She just never learned how."
Dana said they should throw it out. The house was going on the market in the summer, and the freezer was the size of a coffin and would have to be emptied anyway. It was only soup.
Tess took out a tub and read it. BEEF BARLEY. She held it against her chest as if Dana had reached for it.
"I'm not putting Mom's beef barley in a garbage bag," she said.
So they made a rule. Every Sunday they would come to the house and take out two things and eat them at the kitchen table, until the freezer was empty. Then they would sell the house.
Dana agreed because she counted. Sixty-two containers, two a week. Thirty-one Sundays, which put the end in the fall instead of the summer, and the realtor would have to live with it. Tess agreed because she didn't count.
The pesto came first, because Tess wanted it. They put it on spaghetti in April, and it tasted like August, and they both had to stop eating for a minute and look at the window.
After that it got easier, or at least more ordinary. Some Sundays they talked about their mother the whole time. Some Sundays they talked about Tess's landlord, or Dana's knee, and only noticed on the drive home that they hadn't mentioned her once, and each of them felt bad about it separately and didn't say so.
Some of it was bad. A CHILI from the back corner had gone grey and feathery with frost and tasted of the freezer, and they ate it anyway, out of a kind of loyalty, and then Dana went out and got burgers. A BEAN turned out to be lentils. A STOCK turned out to be gravy. Tess began to keep a list on the fridge of what things said and what they were, and Dana told her it was morbid, and then added to it.
They argued about the microwave. Their mother had never put soup in the microwave. She had thought it did something to it. Dana said it did nothing to it, it was a microwave, and Tess said that wasn't the point, and they heated everything in the small dented pot from then on, which took twenty minutes, and they stood at the stove together and waited.
There was one tub halfway down whose label said only "?".
Tess found it in July. She turned it over and looked at the bottom, as if the answer might be there. It was something reddish-brown, frozen in a slope where it had been put in at an angle.
"She didn't know either," Dana said.
"She knew when she made it."
"Then she'd have written it."
Tess put it back. Neither of them said anything about saving it. But every Sunday after that, when they went out to the garage with the flashlight, they moved it aside to get at the others, and put it back on top.
By November the bottom of the freezer was showing, white and furred, with a bag of ice that had fused into one stone. There was a STOCK left, and the "?".
They thawed the "?" in the sink all afternoon. When it was soft enough, Tess heated it in the dented pot and Dana stood next to her, and they both leaned over it.
"Apple butter," said Tess.
"It's chutney. There's onion."
"There's no onion."
"Taste it. There's onion."
They ate it on toast at the kitchen table, which was all the furniture there was left. It was sweet and dark, with something sharp under the sweetness, and it might have been apple, and it might have been plum. It was good. Whatever it was, it was very good.
"She knew," Tess said.
Dana didn't argue. She ate the last of her toast. Then she got up and went out to the garage and unplugged the freezer, and they washed the dented pot and dried it, and put it in the box for Tess to take.
They left the STOCK in the freezer for the new people, though it would be thawed by Tuesday and Dana said so.