Chapter 4: Taste Memory

"Lots of people write in capital letters," Abel said.

I held the foil label up between two fingers.

"Lots of people write six PM, oven three twenty-five, don't peek?" I said. "On masking tape? In the same black marker?"

"It's a common marker."

"Abel."

He looked at the label, and he looked at the ceiling, and he looked at the staircase by the dish pit.

"Ask him yourself," he said finally.

I did.

I climbed the narrow stairs that Thursday afternoon with a cup of tea.

That's what you bring a man who has barely spoken in a month.

Ansel sat in a green recliner with a blanket on his knees and the television turned to a game show.

I held out the label.

He took it, and he looked at it a long time, and his thumb moved across the capitals.

Then he handed it back and turned up the volume.

"Mr. Cushman," I said.

A woman on the screen won a refrigerator.

"Mr. Cushman, I need to know who made the pans."

The refrigerator woman screamed with joy.

I put the tea on the arm of his chair and went back down, shaking.

"That went well," Abel said from the dish pit, not looking up.

"You knew," I said.

He rinsed a pot, very slowly.

"I knew he cooked," he said. "Everybody in town knew he cooked. He ran this diner for fifty-five years."

It was a good answer, and it was not an answer, and I was too busy to dig.

At six, the back door banged open and Mabry came in with a dozen people.

"Don't be mad," she said.

"Why would I be mad?"

"I put it on the town page. Anybody who remembers anything about the Hall dinner, come to the diner at six."

She pulled off her red-framed glasses and fogged them again with her own breath.

"I may have undersold how many people loved your grandmother."

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