The phone rang later and Vincent said he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He’d be working late and he would just grab a sandwich out of the vending machine. My first reaction was that he was tired of my cooking. It was the seventh year of our marriage and Vincent was becoming bored with me, I could tell. Dishes that I’d worked on all day were tossed aside after one bite. Maybe I was reading way too much into his eating habits, but I felt something was going way wrong. Miss Edna thought nothing of it, except she was horrified that sandwiches could be bought from a vending machine, and made me agree to at least bring him bread pudding at work later on in the evening.
We made three separate puddings. Miss Edna had talked Mr. Shelton out of all the old French bread at the store, if she promised to bring him a pudding. We added a few more eggs and a little cream to one of the recipes. In another, we mashed the bread into small pieces and made a custard on the stovetop before we baked it. We simply followed the recipe for the last one, but added pears and a few raisins. I thought that one was almost inedible. I didn’t particularly like any of them, but Miss Edna was adamant that I take one to Vincent. She took about ten minutes to wrap it in foil and then bundled it up in a brown paper bag. I headed out after another glorious day in the kitchen, not sure which one of the puddings I was holding. Miss Edna had set them on the windowsill to cool, but took them off when the Saxton boys came riding past on their bikes. They were known to steal. They’d been up and down the street so many times, we’d just gotten the puddings all mixed up.
“Now, you make sure you go out there and give that to your husband.” She knew I was seriously thinking of leaving it out on the kitchen counter with a note.
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