Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

She flipped the chop over and repeated the process before she dropped it into the hot grease sizzling in her skillet. She counted the chops as she blew a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. Three in the skillet cooking and six on the platter already done.
    “Oh,” she jumped back as a particularly large splatter of grease landed on her bare forearm. She dabbed at the burning place with a dry kitchen rag, draped the cloth near the stove edge, and hurried to lift the heavy lid off the potatoes bubbling in their own skillet. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out two green onions. With the knife she’d yanked from her spice rack, Eula sliced the green tops into the potatoes.
    Eula chanced a glimpse at her husband. Alex, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, gave no notice that he’d paid attention to any of her hurried activities. Coffee at night? Fresh-cooked pork chops at supper? This was more like breakfast or dinner rather than the last meal of the day. True, Alex had spent a heavy week finishing up the harvest. All but the mid-forty were in the barns and hanging on the drying poles. It was still just the first week of September. Maybe that accounted for her husband having her cook up enough food to feed the entire Lawnover Joseph-the-Shepherd Baptist Church on a Friday night.
    “How much of that chicken we got left from dinner?” Alex stood and walked over to the stove to stare at the skillet.
    In twenty years, her husband had never watched her cook, nor questioned her portions. The surprise of it all had just about taken every word out of Eula’s mouth.
    “We got a whole one left. I’m going to warm it for breakfast,” she managed.
    Alex barely escaped a second grease splatter.
    “Where’s the butcher paper?” He paced from the stove to the table to the porch door and back again.
    Eula watched him walk the same path a second time and forgot to turn over a pork chop. Was her husband walking in circles?
    “Butcher paper?” She ventured a tentative response.
    “Yeah. The butcher paper.” More than a trace of annoyance shot out of Alex’s mouth.
    Startled at a husband who almost never raised his voice to her, she neglected to remove one of the chops from the skillet.
    “It’s rolled up in a corner in the pantry.” She watched Alex brush past her and head into the back room off the kitchen.
    Eula inventoried the day to see what might have addled her husband into such a frenzy. Breakfast had been as usual and dinner had been hearty enough. Surely, he couldn’t be this hungry. There had been nothing untoward with the chores. Yes, Alex had milked the cows when, technically, that was a wife’s job. In fact, he had done the milking the last two mornings. But she hadn’t paid much mind to that. In their marriage, the two of them had worked out most things in a way that didn’t require talking. Each could just see what outside chores needed to be done and head straight to it. Whichever one happened to be in the barn at milking time just did the milking. Alex liked it that way.
    But this Friday night puzzled her. Perhaps the lagging harvest on the mid-forty worried her husband more than he let on, though Eula prided herself on being able to read Alex better and faster than he could read himself. She bit down on her lip as her husband came back into the kitchen with a torn-off strip of butcher paper in his hands and three jars of her peach preserves. Laying them all on the table, Alex walked over to the food safe and removed tomorrow’s breakfast chicken. The smoky smell of burning cloth finally told Eula she had dropped her dry kitchen rag too close to the fire.
    “My Lord,” she shouted as she began to beat out the flame with her hands.
    “Here.” Alex reached her in two strides and poured his coffee over the rag. “How much longer for those chops?”
    Eula pulled at the collar of her dress. It was too tight in the heat of tonight’s kitchen.
    “They’ll be ready by the time I heat up your pole beans and corn bread. Do you want buttermilk or sweet milk for supper?” When had her husband last acted like this?
    “I’ll take the pole beans in a jar. Where’s the corn bread?” He had moved back to the kitchen table, the four cooked pork chops dripping grease over his hands. He scrunched the brown paper over the meat.
    Eula stood stock-still. In the back of her mind, somewhere, the scent of burning meat registered, but, for the life of her, she couldn’t match up the smell