She softened at once — made me cocoa, sat me down, smoothed my hair back and said she was sorry, over and over.

But she never told me why.

The tin just went back up on its shelf, and I never touched it again.

I have turned that afternoon over in my mind more times than I can count, especially since.

It was so unlike her.

Mama was not a hand-smacking woman; she was a woman who reasoned with you, who explained a rule three times over until you were sick of hearing it.

The one time she ever struck at me was over an old enamel tin of what I believed was flour, and then she cried almost as hard as I did and spent the rest of the evening being tender in a way that felt, even to a twelve-year-old, like penance.

I filed it under the ordinary strangeness of grown-ups and forgot the specifics.

What I remembered was the cocoa, and her hand in my hair, and the feeling that I had frightened her somehow without understanding how.

She was, in every other way, the most prepared person I have ever known.

That pantry was proof of it.

She was a woman who had grown up without much, who had raised two children through lean stretches, and who never again in her life let a shelf go bare if she could help it.

She stocked against bad winters and hard months and troubles she couldn’t name.

I used to tease her about the beets.