Carol tossed the jar underhand across the kitchen.
“Guess this one’s yours too, Linda.”
I caught it with both hands.
It was a pint mason jar of plum jam. A square of faded calico was tied over the lid with kitchen twine, and a white number was painted on top in enamel.
40.
“Forty years of jam!” my sister-in-law Jeanette laughed. “You should get a plaque.”
The whole kitchen was grinning. Nineteen people crowded around Carol’s granite island in Ames, Iowa, on Christmas night, the first Christmas since my mother-in-law died. It was warm, easy, affectionate laughter, the kind people give a joke they’ve told so many times it’s turned into a kind of love.
I held the jar.
It was heavier than it should have been.
I noticed it the way you notice a wrong step on a familiar staircase. Thirty-nine jars of plum jam had passed through my hands over forty years. This one sat in my palms like a stone.
“Thank you, Carol,” I said.
I put it in my bag, said goodnight, and drove the sixty miles home with it on the passenger seat. Belted in.
My name is Linda Haddon. I’m sixty-four. For forty years I let my husband’s family decide who I was, so let me tell you myself.
I was the bookkeeper for a feed and grain co-op in Marshalltown, Iowa, for thirty-one years. I know what a savings bond looks like and what it’s worth. I married Tom Haddon in June 1985 in a Lutheran church with a leaking roof, and I moved sixty miles from my own mother’s kitchen into his family’s.
Tom was the youngest of three. Carol, the oldest, is sixty-eight now, a retired real estate agent with a lacquered silver bob and a talent for compliments that come with a hook in them. Jeanette, two years younger, managed a dental office and has a high, bright laugh she uses like a fan.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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