The Last Batch of Relish
Dolores Kemp had made the same mushroom-cabbage relish every September for forty-one years, and this year she was making it alone.
She stood at the counter of her kitchen in Elkhart, Indiana, a paring knife in one hand and a head of cabbage in the other, and she did not look at the empty chair by the window where Walt used to sit and tell her she was cutting the shreds too thick. He'd been gone eight months. The relish was his mother's recipe, carried over from a farm outside South Bend, and every jar Dolores sealed felt like an argument she was losing to a dead man about knife work.
Her daughter Renee called at six that evening, right as the pot of vinegar and mustard seed came to a boil.
"Mom, are you seriously doing the relish thing again?"
"Somebody has to."
"Nobody has to, that's the point. Nobody's asked for it in years except Dad, and Dad's—" Renee stopped herself. "I just don't want you standing over a hot stove by yourself for six hours."
Dolores didn't answer. She measured out four cups of chopped mushrooms, cremini, the way Walt liked them, and dropped them into the pot.
The trouble started three days later, when she drove the first two dozen jars to the Elkhart County Fair to enter them, as she had every year since 1985, in the Home Preserves division. Entry fee was eight dollars. She'd paid it in cash at the folding table outside the exhibit hall, same as always, and set her jars — labeled in Walt's blocky handwriting, because she'd kept a sheet of his labels and photocopied them rather than write her own — on the judging shelf.
She lost. Third place, a white ribbon, to a woman named Carol Anspach who'd entered a pepper relish that Dolores privately considered too sweet by half. That alone wouldn't have mattered. What mattered was what happened after, when Dolores went to collect her jars from the shelf and found only twenty-three where she'd left twenty-four.
She counted twice. A jar of the mushroom-cabbage relish, sealed with a red gingham cap, the last jar off the last batch Walt himself had helped can before his heart gave out in April, was gone.
"Maybe somebody just picked up the wrong jar," said the fair volunteer at the table, a heavyset man named Perry who ran the exhibit hall check-in. "Happens every year. People take home whatever looks closest to theirs."
"It doesn't look like anything else here," Dolores said. "It's got his handwriting on it."
Perry shrugged in the particular way of a man who has already mentally moved on to his next task, and told her to check the lost-and-found table by the 4-H barn.
She didn't find it there. She went back the next morning, and the morning after that, walking the rows of the exhibit hall like she was looking for a lost dog, asking anyone who'd stand still long enough. Renee thought she'd lost her mind over "a two-dollar jar of pickled cabbage," which was the exact wrong thing to say to a woman who had, in the space of one summer, buried her husband of forty-six years and then misplaced what felt like the very last thing his hands had touched.
On the fourth day, a teenager working the funnel cake stand mentioned, almost in passing, that he'd seen Carol Anspach's grandson carrying a jar like that out to their truck — "the one with the red top, weird handwriting on the label, my mom pointed at it 'cause it looked homemade-homemade, you know?"
Dolores found Carol Anspach at the Anspach family's stand two rows over, selling raspberry jam at six dollars a jar.
She didn't accuse her. She'd thought about it the whole walk over — what she'd say, whether she'd say anything at all — and in the end she just asked, plainly, if Carol's grandson had picked up a jar of relish by mistake at the judging table.
Carol went still in a way that told Dolores everything before a single word came out. Then she said her grandson Tyler had found it sitting loose near the trash bins after the judging, figured someone had pitched an extra, and she was sorry, she truly hadn't looked closely at whose it was — they'd already opened it and eaten half over crackers two nights ago.
Half of it. Gone.
Dolores felt something in her chest crack open, quick and hot, the kind of anger she hadn't let herself feel even at the funeral. Not because of the relish itself — she knew, standing there, how foolish it would sound to anyone who hadn't watched Walt stir that pot every autumn of their marriage, hadn't watched his hands, spotted with age, level a cup of mustard seed with the flat edge of a knife the exact same way every single year. It wasn't cabbage and mushrooms in a jar. It was the last thing they'd made together.
"I need the rest of it back," Dolores said. "Whatever's left."
Carol brought it from a cooler in the truck — half a jar, the gingham cap slightly bent, Walt's handwriting smudged where damp fingers had gripped it. She held it out with both hands, the way you'd return something you understood, too late, was never really yours to take.
"I really am sorry," Carol said. "If I'd known—"
"You didn't know," Dolores said. "It's alright."
It wasn't, not entirely, but she took the jar anyway and carried it to her car with the same care she'd used carrying it into the fairgrounds four days before. She didn't cry until she was in the driver's seat with the door shut, engine off, half a jar of her dead husband's last relish sitting in the cupholder like it was something that could still be spilled.
That night she called Renee and told her the whole thing — the missing jar, the boy at the funnel cake stand, Carol Anspach's face when she understood what she'd let her grandson eat off crackers.
"Mom, I'm coming over Saturday," Renee said. "We'll make the next batch together. I want to learn how to do it before I forget how you cut the cabbage."
"I cut it too thick," Dolores said. "Your father always said so."
"Then teach me to cut it too thick," Renee said. "Same as you do it."
Dolores looked at the half-jar on her kitchen counter, sealed back up now, set beside the stack of fresh lids she'd bought for next week's batch. She didn't finish that half-jar. She put it in the back of the refrigerator, behind the milk, where she wouldn't have to look at it every time she opened the door, but would know exactly where it was if she ever needed to.
