Sunny arrived home to find the living room empty. “Hey, Dad!” she called. “You here?”
“In the kitchen,” Mike called back.
If Mike was searching for turkey, he was definitely looking in the wrong places. He stood at the top of their step stool, his head in one of the top kitchen cabinets, moving cans down onto the counter.
“What’s up?” Sunny asked, quickly stashing her package in the fridge.
Mike extracted his head from the cabinet and came down to floor level. “Got a call from Helena Martinson,” he explained. “She’s trying to stir up some donations for the food pantry. They’re getting more business than they can handle. I figure there’s stuff up top and in the back that’s probably been lurking since before I got sick.”
He sighed, thinking back to those wonderful days when he could eat anything he pleased. “Some of that stuff can probably go—like these.”
Standing front and center on the counter were a couple of small canned hams. “They were on sale right before I got sick. I remember picking them up, figuring I could slice them up and nuke myself a dinner, maybe make sandwiches. Or chop one up and make hash.” Mike shrugged. “Now I figure there’s too much fat and salt in ’em for me to eat—but they might help a family make dinner.”
Sunny nodded. “And there’s probably soup and canned veggies with more salt than you need. How about I climb and you sort?” She glanced around. “Where’s Shadow?”
Mike pointed. “His usual perch—on top of the refrigerator.”
As she climbed up the steps, Sunny found herself level with Shadow, who watched these unusual proceedings with a suspicious eye.
“Take it easy,” she assured him, “we’re not going after your food.”
Sunny bent to get into the cabinet and began passing cans down to Mike. “Yikes!” she exclaimed as she found one that was so swollen, it wobbled as her hand brushed it.
Carefully picking up the container, she looked at the label. “When did you ever buy canned apricots? And why?”
Mike shrugged. “Can’t say.” Then he held up a finger, frowning. “Wait a minute. There was a recipe in the magazine that comes with the Sunday paper. It was for homemade barbecue sauce. You started out running canned apricots through a blender.”
“And when was this?” She nervously eyed the deformed can. Its top and bottom made little domes.
“Barbecue season,” her dad replied. “Summertime.” He squinted into the air, trying to call up the memory. “Can’t have been last summer. I was still pretty much out of it. Didn’t go shopping on my own. Maybe it was the summer before? Or the year before that?”
“Whenever it was, we’re lucky this thing didn’t explode and leave us cleaning apricots and sticky apricot juice from all these shelves,” Sonny said. “Why don’t you get a bag, and we’ll put this away separately.”
She carefully combed each shelf, but luckily the can of apricots was the only time bomb she discovered. The contents of each shelf got divided—what could go, what should stay—and the keepers were returned to the cabinet. By the time they were done, they’d accumulated a good-sized collection of stuff that Mike shouldn’t be eating anymore—canned hash, sloppy Joe mix, Vienna sausage, jars of meat sauce, and a lot of salty canned vegetables.
“Canned potatoes?” Sunny said in disbelief, hefting a can. “You couldn’t just cook a potato?”
“They’re cut up in little chunks.” Mike defended his choice. “Good for making potato salad.”
They also contributed some dry food to the collection. For some reason, Mike was heavily overstocked on corn muffin mix. And he also added most of their boxes of flavored gelatin. “I had more than enough of that stuff in the hospital,” he said. “And when I came home here, flat on my back, I ate it to please you. No more. If I get really sick again, let’s stick with applesauce.”
Mike went into the garage and returned with a cardboard carton marked “Books.”
“One of the ones you already emptied,” he quickly explained when he saw the look of dismay on Sunny’s face. “I figured if it could stand up to your library, it should be able to hold this stuff.”
Sunny agreed and, after they got everything stowed away, asked, “Do you want to drive over now?”
“It’s getting kind of late.” Mike glanced out the window. The light was already fading. “We’ll both go tomorrow. That’s when Helena will be there,” he added in as offhand a tone as possible.
“Okay,” Sunny said, reaching up to the top of the fridge to pet Shadow while he nuzzled against her hands. That let her hide her grin from Mike.
*
