A Proof Copy for the Saturday Table

Mara Dene had put the word improved in the email because she was trying to be kind.

At forty-six she knew how to make a page look finished. She aligned headings, cleared accidental spaces and stopped a short line dangling at the top of a column. Her mother Etta's contribution had arrived on two sheets torn from a notebook, with an arrow that began in the margin and ended somewhere near the word butter. Mara had made it look like the other contributions. Then she had written: Here is the improved version.

Etta rang instead of replying.

"Improved for whom?"

Mara moved a mug away from the keyboard.

"For the booklet, Mum. The layout."

"You changed the words."

"Only to make them consistent."

At the other end, a drawer closed. Etta was seventy-one and had never learned to leave a phone conversation still. Mara imagined her looking for a teaspoon, then reminded herself that she did not actually know.

"Come Thursday," Etta said. "Bring the version you think is mine."

The booklet was for the Saturday table at Alder Rooms, a fictional community venue whose noticeboard held three notices about returning chairs. Eighty copies, agreed with the printer. Mara had offered to assemble the pages, not to begin an argument about a bun.

She opened the email again. Improved sat there, useful and unashamed.

The contribution occupied page four. Etta's Tuesday Buns. Under the title Mara had written: A family favourite, perfected over many years.

She had added that sentence herself. It sounded like something a booklet ought to say.

On Thursday Etta put the printout beside the original sheets. Her kitchen table was small enough that both versions touched the fruit bowl. Nothing in the bowl was fruit except a lemon of uncertain employment.

"I didn't perfect it," Etta said.

"It's just an introduction."

"Then introduce what happened."

Mara sat down. From the street came the reversing note of a delivery van and a conversation about a parcel neither person seemed to want.

Etta tapped the typed instructions.

"You took out the bit about the bowl."

"The chipped bowl doesn't affect the method."

"I didn't say it did. I said I used it because Cora gave it to me."

Mara had treated that line as an aside. The template had room for ingredients, method and one short memory. She had moved the bowl into the memory, then shortened the memory until the bowl disappeared.

"Who is Cora in this?" she asked.

Etta looked at her.

"Cora Vale. Two streets away. You know her."

"I know who Cora is. I mean what part of the recipe."

"Most of the beginning."

Mara looked at the title again.

Mara remembered the buns from Tuesdays when Etta finished work before the school bus arrived. She remembered paper on a tray, her brother saying the middle one was larger, and the chipped green bowl holding something she had not been allowed to eat raw.

She had arranged those memories into a useful shape. Mother in kitchen. Daughter at door. A family thing passing down intact.

Etta remembered a different Tuesday.

"Your father was away on a job. The washing machine had stopped. I went to Cora's to use hers and stayed because she asked me to help."

"With the buns?"

"With finding her glasses. They were on her head. After that, the buns."

Mara laughed. Etta did not seem to mind that part being funny.

"She showed me what she did. I changed a few things later. Some worked. One batch could have repaired the garden wall."

"You never told us."

"You were eight. You wanted the middle one."

The sentence was not an accusation, which made Mara hear it more clearly. She had mistaken the limits of what a child noticed for the limits of what had happened.

"I can add Cora," she said.

"Ask Cora. Don't just add her."

Etta slid the paper back. "And don't make me sound like I was running a test kitchen. I was trying to get something ready before you both came through the door."

Rafi Cole answered at the print shop with a pencil in his hand. Mara knew that because he appeared in the doorway still holding it, though she had only called from outside to ask whether he had time.

He was fifty-one, with reading glasses that hung from a cord and the patient expression of someone who had heard the words tiny correction before.

"How tiny?"

"A paragraph. Possibly a title."

"Then it's a paragraph and possibly a title."

Their agreed slot was Friday afternoon. Eighty stapled booklets. Rafi would print from the final file after Mara approved a proof. He could accept the corrected file by eleven on Friday. Later changes would mean a different arrangement, not a favour he could hide inside his day.

Mara checked the time in her diary and wrote it down.

"No one has printed the eighty?"

"No. You haven't approved the proof. That's what a proof is for."

She knew that. She worked with pages. Still, hearing it helped. Her mistake had not yet become eighty mistakes.

He gave her one folded sample to check the order. On page four, her mother's name sat beneath a line Etta had never said.

"Can I keep this?"

"Please do. It won't improve on its own."

He smiled only after she did.

Cora Vale was seventy-three and suspicious of the expression community cookbook because it sounded, she said, as if the community might arrive expecting dinner.

Mara explained the booklet, the Saturday table and the permission she wanted. Etta sat beside her on the sofa. Cora read the proposed page without being hurried.

"I don't want my kitchen described," she said.

Mara uncapped her pen.

"All right."

"It had nothing to do with the buns. It was untidy, and I don't need that preserved."

"Then it won't be."

Cora asked for the line about finding her glasses to stay out too. She did not mind the story privately. She did not want to be the amusing old woman on a printed page.

Mara had liked that detail. She crossed it out.

As for the recipe, Cora did not claim to have invented it. She had learned a version from a neighbour years before. She could remember the woman but not whether the woman had devised it either.

"Say Etta learned it in my kitchen and made it her own way. That's true enough. Don't send me looking for the beginning of baking."

They read the revised note together. Cora agreed to her name and to that account of the connection, not to everything Mara might later think interesting.

At the door she gave Etta an empty container.

"Yours, I think."

"It hasn't been mine since you started keeping buttons in it."