Days came and went. Months came and went. Summer came and went. The start of school came and went. Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, came and went. Steven and I heard nothing from David and Marian. Despite invitations to barbeques, birthdays, holidays and celebrations. Their silence was a cold stone in my belly.
I blamed myself for caring too much about a bowl. For asking too often, when I clearly was not going to get it back from it. For being willing to sever our family ties over something that held such little importance in the grand scheme of things.
On New Year’s Day, Steven and I were sitting in the living room together, separately scrolling on our phones through Instagram, Blue Sky and Facebook, when Steven raised his eyes from his screen and asked me, “Do you really think he took it?”
“What?” I asked, drawn from my doom scrolling about the presidential election’s aftermath. “Who took what?”
“Do you think David really took that bowl?”
“Of course he took it. What else might have happened to it?”
Steven put his phone down, chewing on the inside of his cheek in thought for a moment before he said, “He never admitted that he has it. He always maintained he didn’t know what you were talking about.”
He was irritating me with these questions, but I tried not to take it out on him. “‘Cause he didn’t want to get caught,” I said coolly.
“That’s not like him,” Steven said.
He had a half-baked theory, I could tell by his line of questioning. “What do you think happened?”
“There was a crack in it, right?” he asked.
“A hairline crack, yes,” I said. I put my phone down on the arm of the couch, trying not to scowl. We had been over this before. If he had thrown it away, then why didn’t he just tell me?
“That day that we loaded up the pod for the final time…that was the day that Ann Marie was helping us?”
Ann Marie, our first cousin once removed. Her grandmother and Mom were sisters. There were things in the house that we thought Ann Marie might want. She had been home from college for the week on spring break (she wasn’t a party kid, she always came home instead of going to Daytona or Destin or Myrtle Beach).
“You think Ann Marie took it?” I asked. “What would a college girl want with a huge mixing bowl like that?”
“No, I’m just remembering, that she was in charge of tidying up the kitchen that day. And I just wonder if she saw that it was damaged, or if she accidently made that crack worse when she was shuffling dishes around, and so she tossed it out.”
It had been more than a year since the bowl went missing, and I had never considered that there was another explanation for its disappearance. I suddenly felt small; it wasn’t me who had been betrayed. I had assumed the worst about my brother. I was not a victim. I was the injuring party.
Without hesitation, I picked up my phone and texted my cousin.
Hey Ann Marie! This is Jenny. Quick question for you- when you came home last spring to help us clean out Mom’s house, do you remember seeing a large, ceramic mixing bowl in the kitchen cabinets? It would have been on the bottom shelf of the cabinet next to the sink.
I watched three dots appear and disappear about three times before her reply came through.
I’m so sorry, Jenny. I didn’t think to tell anybody at the time, everyone was so busy. I broke the bowl when I was rearranging the cabinet. I think it must have already had a crack in it, and it just split right in two when I banged it against the side of the cabinet. I threw it out with the trash.
I stared at the message, my guilt now causing a rising panic that made my head spin. Steven noticed.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“You were right,” I said. “How did we not think of this? How did all of us miss this really simple explanation?”
“We all just see what we want to see,” he said.
Oh that’s okay, Ann Marie! We were just curious what had happened to it. I hope you’re having a good winter break!
I sat with my disbelief and my shame for who knows how long. Then I picked up my phone again and called my brother. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t answer.
I texted him instead. Hey, David. I just wanted to wish you a Happy New Year. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t have the words just yet to say anything about the bowl and the arguments over it. About the hurt I felt, about the hurt I had caused. I put the phone down.
“Did you just text David?” Steven asked.
“I wished him a Happy New Year,” I said, chewing on my thumbnail.
“I’m sure that will help,” Steven said wryly.
I threw a throw pillow at him, and continued to stew in embarrassment and confusion.
The next day, a package arrived addressed to me. It was big, and heavy and square. It was from an eBay seller, but I hadn’t ordered anything from eBay.
“Did you get something for me?” I asked Steven, placing the package on the table where he was currently reading the news on his phone while he ate pretzel sticks.
“No,” he said, without looking up from the article. He shoved three pretzels into his mouth and crunched without interest for what was in the box.
I sliced open the tape and began unpacking the box. It was something roundish, and wrapped in bubble wrap. As I peeled back the layers of bubble wrap, I had a nagging suspicion of what I would find. When it finally emerged, I gasped so loudly, that Steven jumped. I almost dropped it on the floor in my disbelief.
It was the bowl. Or, at least, it was one just like it.
There was a note included in the box. It was a single sheet of paper taped shut, and it read
Your brother wanted to make sure that you knew he hunted this down for months for you. I hope you enjoy this vintage Pyrex bowl. He must love you a lot to keep up the search for so long! -Judith
“What is it?” Steven asked. I passed him the note, and I watched his eyes scan the words. “What?” he asked the letter, in just as much shock as I was.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and called David. This time, he did answer.
“Hello?” he said, as if he didn’t know who was on the other end of the call.
“David,” I whispered. I paused, unable to think for a moment. “I…I got your package,” I managed.
“Yeah? I got your text yesterday. I thought it might have gotten to you.”
“I just…I mean…David…why?” I was a mess of emotions. I had spent so long being angry with him, and all the time, he was trying to find the one thing that he knew would appease that anger.
“Well, Marian and I figured that if we could just give you what you wanted, despite having it ourselves, that it would somehow make you less mad at us, and then we could actually be a family again.”
He sounded curt. He had every right to be. “But…David, look, I know you didn’t take it.”
“Oh, really?” he asked.
“Ann Marie broke it,” I said, tears now stinging my eyes. “And she threw it away without telling anyone.”
Silence. “Well, that’s a theory that Marian and I had, but we didn’t think you’d listen to it, so we never brought it up.”
“David, I’m sorry,” I started, fully intending to spill my guts to him.
He interrupted me before I could say more. “Yeah. Yeah, I bet you are.”
Again, it sounded curt, but not rude. He was hurt; I had blamed and maligned him, misunderstood him, believed the worst about him. Why would he want anything to do with me?
“Listen,” David said through the thick air that had surrounded me. “We can work this out.” His words were slow, deliberate, an invitation to continue the conversation at another time.
“I’d like that,” I said. “I never intended all this.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up without another word.
As I looked down at the mixing bowl, I realized all that pain was never really about Mom’s mixing bowl. The anger I had felt towards my brother was another form of grief. I had wanted something so badly for my whole life, and when I lost it along with my mom, that pain had to go somewhere. I was ashamed that the pain and the loss had hurt someone I had cared about so much.
“You gonna keep it?” Steven asked.
“Yeah. I think I’ll set it where I can see it, to remind myself not to make assumptions.” I rubbed a hand over my face and then wiped the few tears that had leaked from my eyes.
“Good idea,” Steven said. He picked up the bowl, and headed towards the sink to wash it.
I crumpled yet another sheet of paper into a ball, tossing it into the garbage along with the dozen others already there. Whenever I got going, there was always too much to say, and the letter ended up being too long and convoluted to make any sense to the reader. It needed to be clear. It needed to be concise. But not so concise that it said almost nothing about my rationale for the decision. It was a difficult balance. Too much had happened in such a short time, and I wanted to address it all.
But I couldn’t possibly address three years in a few pages. That’s why I kept starting over.
I pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the stack of loose leaf that I kept in the desk drawer. I had bought the packet of it for my son about four years ago, when he first started high school. It had been on the supply list, but he hadn’t opened it at all. It came home in his backpack on the last day of school untouched. So I stuck it in the office, thinking that I’d need it for myself one day. Four years later, and it was being used as trash can filler.
I started again.
Dear David,
I don’t hold anything against you. I understand why you did what you did. I don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t see where you are coming from. That said, I don’t believe that you’ve been entirely fair to me. I wish we could have come to some kind of agreement about this, but honestly, I don’t see how we are ever going to see eye to eye again. There is too much hurt between us now for me to ever trust you with anything important. Even if we can manage to come together at some point in the future, the hurt you’ve done to me feels like it will never go away. I’m not being dramatic when I say I will never get over it.
I paused, my pen hanging above the paper, looking at the last sentence I had written. I perhaps was being dramatic with that one, but I also didn’t care. David had taken the one thing that I had always wanted for my own, and he refused to recognize I had told him multiple times that it should have been mine. He claimed that Mom said he could have it, even though she and I had always talked about how it would become mine when she died. David also claimed that he had no idea that Mom had promised it to me, or else he wouldn’t have taken it. He was a liar, and he was a cheat. If he felt so bad about taking it, then why didn’t he just give it to me?
The item in question wasn’t really worth anything at all except the nostalgia. In fact, if other people in the family knew we were arguing over it, I’m sure they would laugh. “That old thing? Why do you care?” It wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t an heirloom. It wasn’t something that was irreplaceable. It wasn’t even an item that was hard to find in the store now. If I wanted one, I could just go and buy one for myself.
It was a bowl. We were arguing over a bowl. My brother and I were about to completely end our relationship over one of Mom’s bowls.
Yes, it was just a bowl, but it really wasn’t about the bowl. It was all the memories that were wrapped up in that bowl. All the summer berries, and pie filling, and sausage balls, and bread dough, and pancake patter that got mixed up in our house as kids were always mixed up in that huge ceramic bowl. And I wanted it. I had wanted it for as long as I could remember. I clearly remember watching Mom mash strawberries in that bowl as I stood on a stool as a four year old kid. I remember thinking as I watched, “I’m gonna do that one day, when I’m a mom too, and I have a big bowl like that.”
And David took it.
When Mom died David and I had rented a dumpster and a storage pod. The dumpster we filled up in a single day. The pod took a little while longer to fill. We packed and repacked boxes. My husband, Stephen, filled up his truck at least 4 times with boxes for Goodwill. We put things in the pod only to take them back out again and put them into Steven’s truck. As the kids ran around the yard and climbed the dogwoods and redbuds, Steven, David and David’s wife Marian worked. Sorting, sorting sorting.
It wasn’t just Mom’s old things. It was our old things too. Dad’s old things. Stuff that had belonged to our grandparents. Items that both of us wanted but didn’t know what to do with. Items that neither of us wanted, but we felt bad about getting rid of. What to do with the piano, and the coffee table that Grandpa had made, and the dining room set that was in near perfect condition? We needed buyers for the antiques. We needed evaluations. We needed help. We needed our parents.
And then there were the things that both of us wanted, and we knew we would fight over. We ended up drawing straws for Dad’s family Bible, Mom’s china set, a painting of Bodie Island Light, and a truly ancient sandwich press that will probably still work once we are both dead (it makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches, and I will die on that hill).
I never thought I’d have to fight him about the mixing bowl. He never even mentioned it to me in all the sorting, purging, packing, and moving. It was in the kitchen one day, and then the next it was gone.
I looked back at the letter I had written, my pen ready to write out the next word, even though my brain didn’t know what it would be. I could not shake the feeling of betrayal. Betrayal. The word would not leave my thoughts. I turned it over and over, like a crystal in the sunlight. It sparkled in places I hadn’t seen at first glance. Yes, David betrayed me, and he wasn’t even sorry.
I wrote out the words slowly. You betrayed me David, and I wish I understood why.
I sealed up the letter in the envelope. I put it in the mailbox with a leftover stamp from sending out my daughter’s graduation invitations. He hadn’t come to the party we’d had for her last week. The less charitable part of me said it was because he was a coward.
I did not want this to be the end of the story, but I didn’t think I would get an answer from David. I went back into the house and tried not to think about it.
The Quick and the Dead 