Page forty-one of the First Baptist Church Cookbook held a lie printed in twelve-point Times New Roman. The entry listed Sunshine Potato Salad under the name of Adeline Gable, the thirty-four-year-old wife of our new pastor, Thomas. I sat at my kitchen table with a cold cup of instant coffee this morning, tracing the black ink with a calloused thumb, and I didn’t get mad.
I am sixty-eight years old, I have buried two husbands under the Texas caliche, and I know how a prairie works. You don’t chase a jackrabbit when you can just wait by the water hole.
That recipe has taken the county fair blue twice, back in eighty-seven and eighty-eight, though my daughter Clara keeps those ribbons in a shoebox up in Abilene. Adeline had hovered over my shoulder like a nervous hawk during the women’s retreat three weeks ago, scribbling furiously in a little green notebook every time I reached for the vinegar jug or the yellow mustard seed. I saw her doing it. I let her do it. She got the proportions of mayonnaise and boiled eggs down on paper, but she missed the entire point of the thing. The real secret to a proper potato salad is never written down because it lives in the wrist and the timing.
She left out the grated sweet onion juice squeezed through a square of cheesecloth until the pulp was dry as dust. Without that sharp little bite to cut the fat, a bowl of potatoes just sits heavy in your stomach like a sack of wet salt. Adeline wanted a quick win for her first big church project, and she thought a fresh coat of printer’s ink would make her an institution.
By noon today, the fellowship hall behind the sanctuary was humming with the usual heat and the smell of fried chicken and damp grass. The long folding tables were shoved together under the pecan trees, bowing under the weight of casserole dishes and Tupperware. I walked out of the side door of the church carrying my heavy stoneware bowl wrapped in a dishtowel, feeling the familiar heft of it against my hip. I set it down near the center of the dessert end, right next to a crystal glass bowl that had Adeline’s name written on a piece of blue painter’s tape on the bottom.
Adeline was standing over by the cooler with Thomas, wearing a linen dress that looked far too stiff for an eighty-degree July afternoon in the panhandle. She spotted my bowl the second I pulled the towel away. Her chin went up just a fraction, and she smoothed down the front of her skirt with both palms.
“I see you brought a side dish, Delores,” she said, walking over with that careful, practiced smile the seminary wives seem to learn in their second semester. “I was hoping someone would bring a potato dish. Though I do hope folks try the Sunshine recipe in the new book first. Consistency is so important for the directory.”
“Well, Adeline, recipes have a way of finding their own level,” I said, smoothing the dishtowel and folding it neatly into my canvas bag. “We will just let the table decide.”
She gave me a tight little nod and drifted back toward the deacon’s wife, but her eyes kept darting over to our corner of the pecan grove.
For the first twenty minutes, nobody paid much attention to either bowl. People were busy with fried drumsticks and three-bean salad, balancing paper plates on their knees while the kids ran around kicking dust up into the shade.
Then the sun climbed higher, and folks started coming back for seconds. That was when the geometry of the table revealed itself.
Adeline’s crystal bowl sat untouched, catching the glare of the noon sun through a thick layer of yellowed mayonnaise that had started to skin over at the edges. A single serving spoon rested on top of it, completely clean, the little notch on the handle gleaming like new money. People would walk past, peer down at the label, and keep right on moving toward the deviled eggs and the macaroni bake.
My stoneware bowl told a different story. By twelve-thirty, the wooden spoon I brought from home was buried halfway to the handle in yellow potato chunks, and the blue glaze around the inner rim was showing through in clean, scraped patches. It looked like a pasture after a herd of cattle had worked it over. My daughter Clara would have laughed if she had been there to see it.
At twelve-forty-five, Pastor Thomas wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, stood up from the picnic bench, and stretched his long frame. He was a tall man with a mild face and an appetite that could outlast a Baptist revival. He looked down the length of both tables, his eyes scanning for something heavy and savory to finish off his meal.
He stopped at Adeline’s bowl first. He picked up the clean spoon, took a tentative bite, and his jaw worked for a second before he quietly set the spoon back down. I saw him swallow hard, like he had just swallowed a nickel.
Then he spotted my stoneware bowl sitting two spaces down. His face cleared up like a weather front after a three-day blow.
Thomas didn’t just take a spoonful. He picked up the heavy bowl in both hands, cradling the blue-glazed ceramic against his stomach, and walked the entire length of the double tables right toward the head bench where the older elders sat with their iced tea. He didn’t say a word to Adeline as he passed her. He just carried my empty dish away like he was hauling gold out of a mine.
“Now that,” the Reverend Miller said, pointing his fork right at Thomas as he set the scraped bowl down in the center of the elder’s table, “is what a potato salad ought to taste like. Delores, you still got the magic in those old hands.”
“It’s just potatoes and practice, Reverend,” I called out from my seat by the water cooler. “And knowing when to stop messing with a good thing.”
Over by the cooler, Adeline’s face went the color of a skimmed peach. She turned sharply on her heel and marched into the church kitchen, letting the screen door slam behind her with a crack that sounded like a dry pine branch breaking in a windstorm. I watched her go, feeling a strange, quiet sort of pity that sat somewhere behind my ribs. She was thirty-four years old and she still thought that claiming a thing made it yours.
Ten minutes later, I went inside to wash my stoneware bowl in the kitchen sink. The room was cool and smelled faintly of bleach and old hymn books. Adeline was standing by the industrial refrigerator with her back to me, gripping the edge of the stainless steel counter so hard her knuckles looked like peeled almonds.
“You knew,” she said without turning around. Her voice was thin, shaking just enough to let me know the seminary hadn’t taught her how to lose an argument in front of the Ladies Aid. “You knew I missed the onion juice.”
“Adeline,” I said, setting my empty bowl down on the drainboard with a soft clunk. “You can print anything you want on page forty-one. You can get the mayonnaise down to the last drop and you can write your name in gold leaf right across the cover. But a shortcut is just a shortcut until someone has to chew it.”
She didn’t answer. She just stood there staring at her reflection in the dark side of the refrigerator door, her shoulders tucked up high around her ears like she was waiting for a thunderstorm to hit the roof.
I ran warm water into the stoneware bowl, took the scrub brush from the soap dish, and went to work on the bottom where the egg yolk had dried to the glaze. It took two minutes of steady scrubbing to get it clean, the bristles making a dull, rhythmic squeak against the clay that felt entirely right and proper in the quiet room. When I finished, I dried it with my own flour sack towel and carried it back out to the porch, setting it upside down on the wooden bench to catch the late afternoon prairie sun.
