I walked over. My heart was doing something funny but I made my voice normal. “Did you make the apple pie?”

She smiled. “I did. Did you like it?”

I said it was the best pie I’d had in years, which was the truth and also not even close to the whole truth.

Then I asked where she learned to make a crust like that. Just trying to sound like a nosy church lady. She laughed a little and said, “Oh, it was my mother’s recipe. I’ve made it so long I don’t even read it anymore.”

My mother’s recipe. I just stood there for a second because my brain kind of stopped working. Which mother, I wanted to ask. But you don’t ask a stranger that.

So instead I said, “I’d love to see the card, if you’ve got it. I collect old recipes.” Which was a lie. I have never collected anything in my life except regret.

And she said the thing that I keep hearing in my head. “I carry it in my purse, if you can believe that. Sixty years and I won’t let it out of my sight.”

She dug around in this big tan pocketbook. I remember the sound of her keys, and a roll of mints, and her saying “hang on, hang on” under her breath. I don’t know why I remember the mints. I just do. And the whole time my hands were going cold and I was telling myself, you’re being a foolish old woman, lots of people put vinegar in pie.

Then she pulled it out. A little recipe card, soft at the corners, the color gone brownish. She handed it to me like it was nothing.

I knew the handwriting before I read a single word.

I knew it. The way she looped the bottom of her capital A. The way she always wrote “warm wtr” with no E because she was in a hurry feeding two kids.

My mama’s hand. The same hand that signed my birthday cards before there were no more birthday cards. Right there, on a card in a stranger’s purse, in a church basement, in handwriting that died when I was six.

And down in the corner, small, the way she put it on everything she made, it said the same three words she always wrote. “For my girls.”

My girls. Plural. Mama had two.

I must have made some kind of sound, because Marian touched my arm and said, “Honey, are you alright?” And I couldn’t answer her. I’m a talker, ask anybody, and I could not get one word up out of my throat.