Carol tossed the jar underhand across the kitchen.
“Guess this one’s yours too, Linda.”
I caught it with both hands.
It was a pint mason jar of plum jam. A square of faded calico was tied over the lid with kitchen twine, and a white number was painted on top in enamel.
40.
“Forty years of jam!” my sister-in-law Jeanette laughed. “You should get a plaque.”
The whole kitchen was grinning. Nineteen people crowded around Carol’s granite island in Ames, Iowa, on Christmas night, the first Christmas since my mother-in-law died. It was warm, easy, affectionate laughter, the kind people give a joke they’ve told so many times it’s turned into a kind of love.
I held the jar.
It was heavier than it should have been.
I noticed it the way you notice a wrong step on a familiar staircase. Thirty-nine jars of plum jam had passed through my hands over forty years. This one sat in my palms like a stone.
“Thank you, Carol,” I said.
I put it in my bag, said goodnight, and drove the sixty miles home with it on the passenger seat. Belted in.
My name is Linda Haddon. I’m sixty-four. For forty years I let my husband’s family decide who I was, so let me tell you myself.
I was the bookkeeper for a feed and grain co-op in Marshalltown, Iowa, for thirty-one years. I know what a savings bond looks like and what it’s worth. I married Tom Haddon in June 1985 in a Lutheran church with a leaking roof, and I moved sixty miles from my own mother’s kitchen into his family’s.
Tom was the youngest of three. Carol, the oldest, is sixty-eight now, a retired real estate agent with a lacquered silver bob and a talent for compliments that come with a hook in them. Jeanette, two years younger, managed a dental office and has a high, bright laugh she uses like a fan.
Neither of them was ever cruel to me, exactly. They were amused. I was the farm girl their little brother brought home, and for forty years they treated me like a pleasant, slightly comical houseguest who’d overstayed her welcome.
Their mother, Ruth, was harder to read.
She was a small, spare, silent woman, widowed at fifty when her husband Walter’s heart gave out in a hayfield. She raised three children on egg money and stubbornness on a hundred and sixty acres along Linn Creek. She kept her pantry like a bank vault and said maybe a hundred words a day, most of them about the weather. When she looked at you, you felt measured.
At my first Christmas, in 1985, she handed me a pint jar of plum jam with calico over the lid and a number painted on top.
1.
Carol laughed. “Welcome to the family, Linda. Mom’s got you on the jam list.”
I ate the jam. It was dark and tart and not too sweet, with a bitterness at the back of the tongue that I loved. I never told Ruth. Somehow she seemed to know.
The next Christmas, I got jar number 2. The year after, 3.
Every Christmas, in Ruth’s farmhouse kitchen, after Carol and Jeanette had opened their velvet boxes, Ruth would turn and put a jar in my hands. A bracelet for Carol. Pearl earrings for Jeanette. A cameo. A gold watch. A ring that had belonged to Ruth’s own mother.
And for me, plum jam.
“Mom’s going to give Linda jam until she’s ninety,” Carol said the tenth year, holding a new gold watch up to the light.
“Honestly, Mom,” Jeanette said. “You could at least switch to strawberry.”
“Linda likes plum,” said Ruth.
I did. I’d never said so. I looked across the table at her, a stooped woman in a gray cardigan with her hands folded, and she held my eyes exactly one second longer than she needed to.
I thought: she’s telling me something. I just didn’t know what.
I washed every jar. I dried each one, put the lid back on, and set it on a shelf in our basement with the numbers facing out. Tom thought it was sentimental.
“Lin, you can recycle those.”
“I know,” I said. I never did.
They were the only things in that family that belonged only to me.
In 2019, Ruth’s kidneys began to fail. She needed dialysis three times a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, at the clinic in Marshalltown. That was forty minutes each way and four hours in the chair. Tom worked at the John Deere plant in Waterloo and couldn’t get the time off. Carol and Jeanette lived in Ames and Des Moines and were “so busy.”
So I drove her. For four years.
I’d retired from the co-op by then. I brought a thermos and a crossword puzzle. Ruth brought silence. Medicare paid for most of the treatment, and her supplement plan covered the rest. I handled her paperwork at her kitchen table, because I’m a bookkeeper and somebody had to.
Ruth died last March, at ninety-one, in her own bed, with the window cracked open. I was holding her hand. Tom stood at the foot of the bed. She didn’t say anything at the end. She just looked at me, pressed my fingers twice, and was gone.
A week after the funeral, Carol and Jeanette sat at Ruth’s kitchen table with a yellow legal pad, dividing up the jewelry. I stood at the sink, washing coffee cups.
They worked in cheerful, quick murmurs. You take the pearls, I’ll take the ring. The cameo’s yours. I’ll have the brooch. A velvet box snapped open. A bracelet clinked.
I wasn’t on the legal pad. I didn’t expect to be.
Carol looked up once and said kindly, “Linda, you can have the dishcloths.”
Nobody mentioned the will. Ruth’s lawyer, a man named Dennis Pruitt, had told the family he’d be filing it with the court and would be in touch. Carol had waved that away.
“Mom’s will is simple,” she said. “She told me years ago. The farm gets split three ways and sold. We’ll each get a nice check.”
I said nothing.
Then came Christmas at Carol’s, the first without Ruth. There was a gap at the head of the table where Ruth’s chair would have been, and nobody mentioned it. After dinner, Carol went into the pantry for coffee filters and came out holding a jar.
“Look what I found in the back of Mom’s pantry when we cleaned it out. She must have made it right before the hospital.”
Jar number forty.
At eleven that night, I took a flashlight down to the basement.
Tom was asleep upstairs. The house ticked around me. The furnace kicked on with a low, warm rumble. The basement smelled of concrete, old paper, and, very faintly, plums.
My shelf stood against the north wall, a plain pine shelf Tom built in 1992. Thirty-nine empty, scrubbed jars sat in a row with their lids on and their little white numbers facing out. I hadn’t touched them in years.
I took down jar number one and turned it over in the flashlight beam. I’m not sure why. Maybe the same instinct that had made me weigh jar forty in my hands.
The lid was an ordinary two-piece gold canning lid, a little rusty around the rim. But something was wrong with the underside. There was a thin, flat shadow, the edge of something paper, held inside the metal with yellowed tape.
My hands started to shake.
I picked at the tape with my thumbnail. It came away brittle and brown. A small folded square slid out into my palm, soft as cloth. I opened it under the light.
United States Savings Bond. Series EE. Issued December 1985. Face value $100, purchased for $50. In the registration box, in neat black type: LINDA M. HADDON.
I sat down on the concrete floor.
I took down jar two. Another bond. Series EE, December 1986. LINDA M. HADDON.
Jar three. Jar four. Jar five. I took them down one after another and pried the lids loose. By the tenth, I’d stopped being surprised. By the twentieth, I was crying silently, my hands still moving, in a circle of flashlight on the cold floor.
The early bonds had a face value of $100. In the 1990s they went up to $200, and by the 2000s they were $500.
Then, at jar twenty-eight, December 2012, the bonds stopped.
Taped under that lid was a small bank receipt instead, from Marshalltown Savings Bank: a deposit slip for $600 into a savings certificate account. The account holder was Ruth E. Haddon. Typed underneath: Payable on death to Linda M. Haddon.
I remembered reading at the co-op years ago that the government stopped selling paper savings bonds at banks at the end of 2011. Ruth hadn’t let that stop her. She’d simply switched to something else.
Jars twenty-eight through thirty-nine each held one of those deposit slips. One for every Christmas. Each said the same thing at the bottom: payable on death to me.
