[ the page where she stopped ]

The wing is not fragile the way you expect. It does not crumble. It sits against the page like a thing that chose to stay.

You find it on a Tuesday. Not a significant Tuesday. You are looking for the cornbread recipe because someone at work mentioned cornbread and you thought, I used to know how to make that, and then you thought, no, she knew, which is a different sentence.

The cookbook is spiral-bound. Its cover says FAVORITE RECIPES in a font that believes in itself. Grease stain on the front, origin unknown, likely older than you.

You open to page 84.

The wing.

Monarch. You know this without looking it up. The orange is deeper than you remember monarchs being — not bright, not decorative. The black veins run through it like a map of somewhere you can't drive to. The white spots along the edge are smaller than you'd think. Almost not there.

The recipe underneath: Lemon cake with rosemary.

Your grandmother did not make lemon cake with rosemary. Not once. Not for any birthday, any church function, any Tuesday or Saturday or holiday you can recover from the soft wreckage of your memory. She made cornbread. She made vinegar pie when there was nothing else. She made a roast on Sundays that filled the house with a smell you have tried and failed to describe to every person you have ever been close to.

She did not make lemon cake with rosemary.

So.

The recipe is handwritten in the margin. Not printed with the book — added later, in pencil, in a hand you recognize the way you recognize your own street from an airplane. You know it without seeing it clearly.

2 cups flour 1½ cups sugar 3 eggs, room temperature zest of 2 lemons — use the small ones 1 sprig rosemary, stripped and chopped fine ¾ cup buttermilk pinch of salt — more than a pinch, be honest with yourself

That last part. Be honest with yourself. You read it four times.

Your grandmother was not a woman who said things like that. Your grandmother was a woman who said nothing in a way that filled the room. Her silences had furniture. You sat in them. Everyone did.

You try to make the cake.

You buy lemons. Small ones. You stand in the produce section and hold them and wonder if these are the right small ones, if small meant something different in 1970 or 1965 or whenever she pressed a butterfly wing into a cookbook and wrote a recipe she never made for anyone.

The rosemary you grow on your windowsill. It has been dying slowly for two months. You strip a sprig anyway. It smells like something trying to survive.

You mix. You measure. The buttermilk is wrong — too cold, you forgot to leave it out — but you use it anyway because she is not here to correct you, and that is the whole problem, stated plainly.

While the cake bakes, you sit at the table with the wing.

You do not touch it. You are afraid that if you touch it, you will learn that it is just a wing. That it means nothing. That she put it there to mark the page because it was nearby, because a butterfly had died on the porch, because it was beautiful and she was practical and beauty, to her, was not wasted if it held a place.

But you are also afraid that if you touch it, something will open that you cannot close.

Here is what you know about your grandmother's silences:

They were not empty.

They were the shape of things she had decided not to say. You could feel the edges. At dinner. In the car. Standing in the garden with her hands in the dirt and her mouth a straight line that was not unhappy, exactly, but was not — was not anything she would let you name.

She did not talk about the years before your mother. She did not talk about the place she came from. She used the word home only to mean the house she was currently standing in. Never behind her. Only beneath her feet.

You asked once, when you were twelve: What were you like when you were my age?

She said: Shorter.

And that was it. That was everything she was willing to give.

The cake comes out dense and golden and wrong.

Not bad. Wrong. It tastes like something that belongs to someone else's memory. Lemon and rosemary and too much salt — you were honest with yourself, like she said — and underneath it a sweetness that doesn't resolve into anything you can name.

You eat a slice standing at the counter. Then another.

It does not taste like her. It does not taste like anything you have eaten before.

You think: maybe that is the point. That she wrote down the one thing she never made. The one recipe that was not for feeding people, not for Sundays, not for keeping a household alive. The one that was just for her. And she marked it with the most temporary thing she could find — a wing, already separated from its body, already half-gone — and she left it.

You put the wing back. Page 84. You close the book.

You do not understand her silences. You understand that they were hers. That she kept them the way she kept this recipe: carefully, without explanation, in a place where someone might find them, years later, too late to ask.

The cake sits on the counter, cooling into its strange self.

You leave it there.