Writer Spotlight: Anne Bower's "Napkin Holder"

Napkin Holder

Anne Bower

The lanky young man sitting across from me in the shed held up one of my chicken napkin holders, and with his other hand, caressed its wooden form. Silly things—orange and yellow with red beaks and buttony eyes, green with white centers. “Where’d you get them?” he asked.

“You know, I don’t rightly recall.” You get past sixty-five and sixty-six memories go all tumbled. Maybe I’d bought them or maybe Alice did. Or one of the kids gave them to us at a past Christmas. “Seems like I’ve had ‘em a long time.”

I never ask people’s names. This kid—spiky hair, a wispy straw colored beard—I’d bet he was a Joe or Bill, Jim or Tom. No matter. He yammered on about his part-time job at the lumber yard and how it was hard finding full-time work. I caught a little stammer now and then.

My daughter, Sylvia, last time she visited, said I should quit giving food away to strangers. She could understand why I started back in the pandemic. “That was a genuine good thing, Dad,” she’d offered. But now, any hopped up druggy could come along and bust my chops, steal my TV, burn the house down. She meant well. I nodded like an old mare approaching the barn, but knew I wouldn’t go in.

My visitor put the napkin holder down and took another bite of his sandwich. “G-g-good bread.”

Those words are all I need to make my day. Alice was the bread maker when the kids were little. Three loaves every Sunday. Every kind—oatmeal, white, anadama, whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel. Breakfast toast, sandwiches, a heel of bread to mop up the very last bit of minestrone in your supper bowl. After she died, I thought about trying, but it felt like robbing the grave. Then, when the world closed down, my kids so far off, neighbors isolated by the state rules, my hands ached for something.

The first loaves were flat and fit only for the compost. But I kept at it. Masked up and went to the grocery store during the hours reserved for seniors, bought better flour, more yeast, sea salt, some extra ingredients like sunflower seeds. Back in my echoing house, I read recipes in Alice’s stained cookbooks and watched videos of breadmaking, kept at it, and learned how to get a good crust, how to create and nurture a sourdough culture. My loaves were never magazine pretty, but they had substance. I painted a sign and put it out at the end of my short driveway:

NEED A SANDWICH? KNOCK ON THE SIDE DOOR.

I kept two kinds of cheese, sliced ham and turkey, mustard and mayo, peanut butter and jelly on hand. During the lockdown, people kept their distance, stood in the yard, chewing away, and were so thankful. “What a kindness.” “This is delicious.” “You don’t know what this means to me.” Some asked for a second sandwich to take with them.

What the hell? It didn’t bust my budget, it gave me something to wake up for. And once the regulations eased, I set up the shed with a table and chairs and let people come in. The company was what I needed, just like I tried to explain to the kids.

“But Dad,” they’d say. “The pandemic’s over and you don’t have to stay home anymore. You’d do more good volunteering down at the senior center or at the hospital.” Maybe they were right.

The fellow across from me had finished his sandwich and was fiddling with the paper napkin. Silence fell as he folded it in half and then made accordian folds the other way. He picked up one of the chicken napkin holders, pushed the paper napkin through the circle inside the chicken’s body, fluffed up the napkin. “There you go, b-b-birdie,” he said, raising and lowering his hand to make it fly.

It had never occurred to me that you could give the napkin holder wings like that. Not to Alice either, I guess. We’d simply take our cloth napkins and shove them into the holders any old which way.

The young man rose and reached a couple of dollars towards me.

“No, no,” I told him. "You can’t buy my sandwiches. Off you go.”