Aunt Vera set the sugar bowl down, picked it up, set it down again. The dent on the left side caught the kitchen light the same way every time. She pressed her thumb into the hallmark - a tiny lion, nearly gone - the way you'd press a bruise to make sure it still hurt.
She spooned Folgers into two mugs with the concentration of someone defusing something, and I uncapped my pen and wrote the date at the top of the first yellow page and underlined it twice - which I never do. The recorder sat between us like a third guest nobody had introduced. Steam came up from both mugs and she slid one toward me without looking at it, without looking at me, without looking at anything except the window above the sink where a plastic cardinal had been suctioned to the glass for so long the red had gone the color of a old brick.
She talked until the Folgers went cold, and I filled four yellow pages and half of a fifth, and at some point the recorder's red light became the only other moving thing in the room. The coat was wool - she said, a man's coat, gray, and her grandmother had sewn a pocket inside the pocket, and the bowl rode against her ribs for nine days on the water. The pound of sugar came in a paper sack from a store on Delancey Street - and her grandmother poured it in slowly, like she was counting, and then put the bowl on the highest shelf in a one-room apartment and stood on a chair just to see it from the right angle. For ten years nobody touched the sugar.
The stranger had a lanyard around her neck and a cardboard box against her hip, and she picked up the bowl the way you'd pick up a lemon, checking weight. She turned it once. The dent faced out and she didn't see the lion and she set it in the bin that said MISC 2. 00 and moved down the table toward the gravy boats.
The legal pad had slid under the passenger seat and I had to reach for it blind - my cheek against the gearshift, until my fingers found the cardboard backing. Under the dome light the handwriting on page two went sideways where I'd run out of table space, and I could see where the pen had skipped, a dry white groove in the yellow paper, and then resumed - the letters smaller after that, tighter, like something being rationed. A moth hit the windshield once and was gone. I sat there with both hands around the pad the way Vera's grandmother had stood on a chair.
The legal pad lives in the drawer where I keep the rubber bands, fat ones, the kind that go brittle and snap when you stretch them. I put a single band around it - lengthwise, and the yellow bleeds up around the edges where the rubber presses. The recorder sits beside it, the red light off, the two AA batteries still inside it because I've never once opened the compartment, and the compartment has a small ridge on it for a thumbnail - and I've never put my thumbnail there.
My daughter found the legal pad last spring, pulling it out by one corner the way you'd pull a splinter, and she read the first page standing up with one sock off, the other still on, because she'd been in the middle of something when she opened the drawer. She asked me who Vera was. I told her to sit down - and she sat on the floor right there in front of the open drawer, and I stood in the doorway and talked until the refrigerator cycled off and the house went quieter than it had been, and she turned to page two where the writing goes sideways, tilting the pad like a map she was trying to orient.
She asked me the name of the store on Delancey Street and I didn't know, and that was the first time I went back to page three - where I had written *grocery - Delancey - blue awning? * with a question mark so large it took up the rest of the line, as if I had already known, sitting in Vera's kitchen with the steam still coming off the mug, that I was going to need to remember the not-knowing too.
My daughter wrote *blue awning? * on her palm in ballpoint, the question mark smaller than mine - more careful, and the ink smeared before she got to the bathroom but she didn't wash it all the way off, just the question mark, so the words stayed in the crease of her lifeline for the rest of the afternoon.
She took the legal pad to school the following Tuesday inside a manila folder she'd labeled in green marker, and when she came home that afternoon she set it on the counter next to the sugar bowl - which had migrated from the drawer to the windowsill sometime in March - I couldn't say exactly when - and showed me a blank index card where she'd written, in the same careful hand, *pocket inside the pocket, nine days, Delancey St. * The card had a hole punched in the upper left corner and a loop of red yarn through it - the kind of yarn that comes in the craft kits they sell at the register, and she'd tied the loop around the bowl's handle so the card hung against the dent. She'd spelled Delancey wrong, one *e* instead of two, and I didn't correct her, and the card swayed once when the refrigerator kicked on.
She asked me last week if we could make a copy of the legal pad - and I told her I didn't know how to copy yellow paper without losing the yellow, and she thought about that for a long moment standing at the counter, then got a fresh index card and wrote *ask about the color* on it in green marker and paper-clipped it to the front cover, which meant she was already thinking of it as a book with a front cover, which it hadn't been until then.
She brought home a scanner from school in a backpack that left red marks on both her shoulders - and she fed each yellow page through it at the kitchen table while the sugar bowl sat at the edge of her peripheral vision, and when page two came out the sideways writing had straightened itself in the scan, corrected by the machine, and she looked at the original and then at the screen for a long time before she turned the scanner off without scanning the rest. The original pages went back into the manila folder and she pressed the brad through the holes with her thumb the way you'd close something you weren't sure you had the right to open. She found a pencil and wrote *wrong color, wrong angle* on the tab in letters so small I had to hold it under the range hood light to read it - the exhaust fan ticking above us, and when I set it back down she moved it six inches to the left so it touched the base of the sugar bowl, and left it there.
