The last time I saw my mother alive, she was standing at her stove, stirring a pot of chicken soup big enough to feed a fire department.
“Mom,” I said. “Who is all that for?”
“You,” she said. “And your brother. And Vanessa and the kids. And whoever.”
“Whoever?”
“Whoever needs soup.” She tapped the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot. “There’s always somebody who needs soup, Bethie.”
That was my mother. Dorothy Larsen. Seventy-four years old, five-foot-one, with white hair she still set in curlers every Saturday night and reading glasses she wore on a beaded chain around her neck because otherwise she’d lose them in the refrigerator. Which she did anyway. Twice a week.
She’d made soup every Sunday for as long as I could remember. Chicken noodle. Beef barley. Split pea with ham. Minestrone in the winter. She’d ladle it into plastic containers, the cheap kind you buy in bulk, and write on the lids with a black marker in her loopy handwriting. CHICKEN NOODLE – OCT. BEEF BARLEY – FOR GREG. SPLIT PEA – DON’T LET LILY’S DAD EAT IT ALL.
Then she’d carry them down to the basement and put them in the freezer.
The freezer was an old white chest freezer from Sears. My father bought it in 2004, the year before he died. It was the size of a coffin and almost as heavy, with a lid that stuck and a hum you could hear from the kitchen. Dad wanted it for venison. He went hunting every November with his brother Walt and came home with enough meat to last until spring.
After Dad died, Mom kept the freezer running. She filled it with soup instead.
“I’m going to fill it up for you,” she said that Sunday, standing at the stove. “Before winter. So you’ll all have plenty.”
“Mom, I live two hours away. I’m not driving to Altoona for soup.”
“You’ll come for it,” she said. She didn’t look up from the pot. “When the time comes, you’ll come.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I thought it was just one of those things she said.
Before I left that afternoon, she walked me to my car. She hugged me in the driveway. She held on a little longer than usual. Then she stepped back and looked up at me.
“The freezer’s full, Bethie,” she said. “Whatever happens. Don’t let anybody throw out my soup.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Promise me.”
I laughed. “I promise. Nobody’s throwing out your soup.”
She nodded. She patted my cheek. She watched me back out of the driveway, standing on the front walk in her cardigan with her glasses on their beaded chain.
Nine days later, she had a stroke in her garden while she was cutting back the roses for winter.
The neighbor found her. By the time the ambulance got there, she was gone.
My name is Beth Larsen. I’m forty-five. I’m a nurse in the cardiac unit at a hospital in Pittsburgh. I’ve been divorced for six years. I have one daughter, Kelsey, who’s a sophomore in college in Ohio and calls me every Thursday night.
I have one brother. Greg. He’s three years younger than me.
Growing up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Greg was everybody’s favorite. Not just Mom and Dad’s. Everybody’s. He was funny and loud and handsome, with Dad’s big shoulders and Mom’s blue eyes. He played football. He dated cheerleaders. Teachers liked him even when he didn’t do his homework. Neighbors liked him even when he egged their houses. He had a way of grinning at you that made it impossible to stay mad.
I was the serious one. The responsible one. The one who did her homework and came home by curfew and went to nursing school and moved to Pittsburgh. I loved my brother. I still do. But I always knew he got away with things I never could.
Greg stayed in Altoona. He started a construction company when he was twenty-eight. Larsen & Sons Contracting, even though there was no “sons.” He just liked how it sounded. He did kitchens and bathrooms and decks. He was good at it. For a while, he did really well.
He married Vanessa when he was thirty. She was a dental hygienist. Quiet and steady and sweet, with dark hair she always wore in a ponytail and a laugh that sounded like she was surprised to be laughing. They had two kids. Tyler, who’s twelve now, and Ava, who’s nine.
Mom adored Vanessa. She used to say Vanessa was the best thing Greg ever did.
I liked Vanessa too. We weren’t close. I lived two hours away. I saw her at Christmas and Thanksgiving and the kids’ birthday parties. She was always polite. Always kind. Always a little quiet.
In the last couple of years, she’d gotten quieter.
I noticed it at Thanksgiving last year. She barely said a word through dinner. She looked tired. Thin. When Greg made a joke, she didn’t laugh. When the kids asked her something, she answered like she was a thousand miles away.
“Is Vanessa okay?” I asked Mom in the kitchen while we did the dishes.
Mom didn’t answer right away. She scrubbed a roasting pan very hard.
“She’s got a lot on her plate,” Mom said finally.
“Like what?”
Mom put the pan in the drying rack. She dried her hands on a dish towel. She looked at me.
“Not my story to tell, Bethie,” she said.
And that was all she’d say.
The funeral was on a Tuesday. At St. Mary’s, where Mom had gone to Mass every Sunday for fifty-two years. The church was full. Mom knew everybody in Altoona. The ladies from the altar guild. The men from Dad’s old union. Neighbors. Former neighbors. The mailman. The girl from the pharmacy. A man from the soup kitchen downtown where Mom volunteered every Thursday for twenty years.
He came up to me after the service, a tall, thin man in a coat that was too big for him.
“Your mother,” he said. “She brought us soup every week. Homemade. In those little containers with her writing on the lids. Twenty years.” His eyes filled up. “She always said there’s always somebody who needs soup.”
“She said that to me too,” I said. “Last time I saw her.”
Greg gave the eulogy. He was good at it. He was always good at standing up in front of people. He told funny stories about Mom. How she lost her glasses in the refrigerator. How she made Dad drive back to the grocery store once because they’d charged her nineteen cents too much for a can of tomatoes. How she called every single grandchild on their birthday and sang “Happy Birthday” in a voice so off-key it made the dog howl.
Everybody laughed. Everybody cried.
But I noticed something. While Greg talked, his hands were shaking. Just a little. He held the edges of the podium to hide it. And his eyes kept going to the back of the church. To the door.
Like he was watching for somebody.
Vanessa sat in the front pew next to me with Tyler and Ava. She didn’t cry during the eulogy. She held Ava’s hand. She stared straight ahead.
When Greg came back to the pew and sat down, she didn’t look at him.
At the luncheon afterward, in the church basement, Greg came over to me with a paper plate of ham and potato salad.
“So,” he said. “We need to talk about the house.”
“Greg. We just buried her. Can it wait?”
“I know, I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But I’m the executor. Mom put me in charge of everything in her will. Remember? And I’ve been thinking. We should sell the house as soon as possible. Before winter. The market’s good right now. If we wait until spring, who knows.”
“It’s been four days.”
“I know. I’m just saying.” He took a bite of ham. “I’ve already talked to a real estate agent. A guy I know. He thinks we can list it in two weeks. And I’ve got a junk removal company coming on Monday to clear out the basement and the garage. All the old stuff. Dad’s tools. The freezer. All of it.”
“Monday? Greg, I haven’t even been through her things yet.”
“You can take whatever you want this weekend,” he said. “Saturday and Sunday. Then Monday the junk guys come. It’s not like there’s anything valuable down there. It’s all garbage.”
He was talking fast. Too fast. He kept glancing at his phone.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” I asked.
His jaw tightened. Just for a second. Then he grinned. That old, easy Greg grin.
“Because I don’t want you driving back and forth from Pittsburgh every weekend for six months,” he said. “I’m trying to make it easy on you, Beth. Come on. Let me handle it. I’m the executor. That’s my job.”
His phone buzzed in his hand. He looked at it. His face changed. Something flickered in it. Something that looked almost like fear.
“I’ve got to take this,” he said. And he walked away fast, out of the church basement, up the stairs.
I watched him go.
Then I turned around, and Vanessa was standing behind me.
She’d heard. I could see it in her face.
“Beth,” she said quietly. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“The freezer,” she said. “In your mom’s basement. The old chest freezer.”
I blinked. “What about it?”
“Please don’t get rid of it,” Vanessa said. “I’ll take it. I’d like to have it.”
I almost laughed. I couldn’t help it. Out of everything in my mother’s house. Her jewelry. Her good china. The grandfather clock in the hall. The quilt her own mother made. My sister-in-law wanted a twenty-year-old chest freezer that was barely worth fifty dollars.
“The freezer?” I said. “Vanessa, that thing’s ancient. It makes a noise like a jet engine. The lid sticks. It’s probably going to die any day now.”
“I know,” she said. “I still want it.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. Her eyes went to the stairs where Greg had disappeared.
“Your mom’s soup is in it,” she said finally. “The kids love her soup. I want them to have it. As long as it lasts.”
That made sense. Sort of. I nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell Greg.”
“No,” Vanessa said quickly. Too quickly. “Don’t tell Greg. Just… don’t let them haul it away. Please. I’ll figure out how to get it to our house.”
She walked away before I could ask anything else.