What Mama Kept

The pantry was the size of a large closet, maybe four feet deep and six feet wide, but Mama kept it like a bomb shelter.

Canned green beans arranged by date, oldest in front. Sugar in the same glass jar it had always been in, sealed with a rubber ring she replaced every January. Coffee filters in a yellow Tupperware container that had lived on the second shelf since 1993, the lid faded to the color of old cream. A row of spices in alphabetical order, which had always struck me as something between organized and sorrowful, the discipline of a woman who needed one corner of her life arranged exactly right.

The flour tin sat on the top shelf.

White enamel with a blue pattern around the rim, chipped in three places from decades of being taken down and put back up. It was the kind of tin that comes with something inside, biscuit mix or cocoa powder, and gets repurposed after the original contents are gone, the label worn off until only the shape of it remains.

We were not allowed to use it.

I learned this the hard way when I was twelve, reaching for it on a Saturday morning because I wanted to make biscuits and the flour canister by the stove was empty. Mama’s hand came down on mine before I had it fully off the shelf, sharp and fast, and I cried more from shock than from pain. She apologized later and made me cocoa and sat with me at the kitchen table while I drank it, her hand on my hair, her voice soft with a regret that seemed larger than the moment warranted. But she put the tin back up high, and I did not reach for it again.

She never explained.

That was Mama’s way with certain things. Some doors she kept closed, and she closed them so gently and so completely that you learned not to knock.

Her name was Beverly Parrish, though she had been Beverly Mercer for the last seventeen years of her marriage to my stepfather Wayne, and Beverly Harmon before that, in the years when she was married to my father, who died young and left her with Russell and me and a house she could not afford and a pantry she kept like a bomb shelter because she had learned early that the difference between having enough and not having enough was the distance between your front door and whatever was on the other side of it.

She was seventy-eight years old when she died. A stroke, in the night, in her own bed, which was the way she would have chosen if she had been given a choice. The hospice nurse said she had likely not been aware, that it would have been fast, that she would not have suffered. I do not know whether this was true or whether it was the thing they say because they understand that families need it to be true.