Part 3: Saturday at Eight
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 of 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 slipped her car keys into her coat pocket.
Saturday came up clear and cold. Frost lay on the truck and a meadowlark sang from the fence post.
Lucille was dressed by six.
She wore Mom’s apron again. But there was no bucket this time, and no rubber gloves. She’d laid the fourteen cartons out on the kitchen table in two rows, names facing the door. Lu’s carton sat 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 held two empty cartons, 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 to 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 tilt 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 dropped 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.”
Two apple boxes sat 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 fetched 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 stood there with a dish towel in her hands.
“Is that the sister?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Send her out here.”
Lucille came. She crossed the whole 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 into the pantry and shut the door, because brown eggs are hard to see through and you want it good and dark. You hold 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 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.
Epilogue: No Excuses
Lucille went home to Lincoln on Sunday afternoon.
Before she left, she slipped the bank envelope into the coffee can. The whole eighty dollars. She never said a word to me about it.
She came back out the next Friday.
On the way, she stopped at the feed store and bought two sacks of layer pellets and a bag of oyster shell, and had Jeff load them into her trunk.
She comes every Friday night now. She sleeps in the spare room. And on Saturday morning, she’s at that kitchen door by eight.
We didn’t sell the place.
Dale and Colt and I moved out to the farm in June, when school let out.
Colt ordered twenty-five chicks through the feed store. He and Lucille banded them at the kitchen table. Orange, for this year. She held them. He did the bands.
Mrs. Pavlik made him take my picture that first Saturday, before she left.
It’s on the icebox now.
I’m standing in front of the coop with a red hen under one arm and Mom’s coffee can in my other hand. The dog crate sits on the tailgate behind me with the last two hens in it. And I’m smiling like a fool.
The cartons still go out with a name in pencil on every lid. The customers still bring them back empty.
Lucille writes them now.
She and Mom learned their letters from the same teacher in the same country school, and their handwriting is so much alike that I have to look twice.
Last Saturday, I picked up an empty carton off the counter to see whose it was.
It said, Zeller, 1 doz, no charge.
And under that, in the same pencil, she had added:
Come for dinner Sunday. No excuses.
He came.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
