The Egg in the Gutter

"The sweater goes over it and that's that."

The "it" is a yellow dress with a white collar, and the "that's that" is the end of a negotiation my niece was never going to win. She stands on the upstairs landing with her arms crossed. I hold the blue sweater up at shoulder height, the way my mother held one up for me on the same landing, on a morning much like this one, a long time ago.

It is colder than anyone planned. The rain came through after midnight and left the grass flat and shining, and the daffodils along the foundation are up but holding their faces shut. The kitchen smells like a grocery store before the doors open: the ham in its box on the counter, the candy bag rolled down on the table, the coffee going bitter in the pot, the vinegar still sharp in the air from the dyeing last night.

My mother sent the good clothes over on a hanger the day before. The dry cleaner's bag rustled all the way up the porch steps. She will be here by the time the ham is in the oven, and she will stand in the kitchen and tell me the oven is too hot, and the oven will not be too hot. That is the arrangement we have.

The baskets are lined up on the bench in the mudroom, the plastic grass stiff inside them, the handles wearing old ribbons from other years. My niece's basket has a crack in the weave that has been taped, and taped again. Somebody in this family is always carrying that basket.

The Night Before

The real eggs went into the dye last night, a row of cups of color on the kitchen table, the table covered with newspaper the way my mother covered it when I was the one dipping. My niece did the dipping. She is at the age where she wants each egg to come out the color on the side of the box, and they come out darker, or blotched, and she says it was on purpose, and I say she is right.

The plastic eggs came after that, the box from the basement full of halves that do not quite match. I sat at the table after she went to bed and filled them one by one.

My niece will not eat the orange jelly beans. She made a list of what she wants in her eggs, and the list says chocolate and no orange. I put orange jelly beans in her eggs anyway, because her brother will eat them. The orange ones are what everybody forgets, and somebody has to remember them.

Every year the number comes out odd. I fill them until the bag is empty and the kitchen table looks like a piñata that broke early, and I trust the morning to make it right. This year the morning did not.

The Hunt

I hid the eggs before anyone was awake, out in the yard at first light, in the bathrobe and the slippers. The plan had been to hide them the night before, but the rain had done the planning, so I was pressing plastic eggs into the roots of the wet grass and feeling the cold come up through the soles of my slippers. The hem of the bathrobe dragged and soaked, and the wet turned the hem gray. The air had that April smell — wet dirt and cold stone. The dog came out with me and followed my pocket, where the eggs had been, and when I went back inside he sat on the mat and would not look at me.

The children line up on the porch steps. The rule is that the youngest goes out first and the older ones wait, and the older ones wait badly. A neighbor's boy is there with a basket too big for him. The dog sits on the walk and watches, because the dog knows what is about to happen.

I hid one in the mailbox, and then a second one in the mailbox, because the first would be found in the first minute and the second would be found in the last, by the child who had given up. The one I lost went into the grass by the fence, where the dew sits late, and I watched it disappear the way a secret disappears.

They run. The wet grass gets them immediately — the hems of the good pants, the knees of the tights, the white socks that will not be white again. None of it matters.

They go for the open eggs first, then the ones half-hidden in the boxwood, and the youngest goes straight to the spot she always goes to, where I put an egg at eye level because I know she will not think to look lower. Her brother steps on the one in the rose bed. The neighbor boy finds the one under the downspout and holds it up like a fish.

When the baskets are full and the candy is being eaten in fistfuls, I stand in the middle of the yard and know we are one short. I count the baskets and the eggs in them, and the empty places where an egg should be, and one is missing. Somewhere in the wet grass is an egg I hid too well, with a chocolate rabbit in it, and the grass is already starting to keep it.

The Oven

The ham goes in while the hunt is still going on. It is a spiral-cut ham, big enough that it barely fits the roasting pan, and the glaze came in a packet that I do not quite trust. I score the top in diamonds and brush the glaze on in stripes, the way my mother does, and put the foil over it. The oven takes over the morning.

By the time the children are being peeled out of their wet socks on the porch, the kitchen window is steamed over and the whole house smells like ham and brown sugar. The timing works out the same way it does every year: the hunt, then the socks coming off, the good clothes straightened, then the shoes, then the car. I set the timer for the length of a service, and I have been wrong before. One year we came home to a ham that had gone farther than anyone intended, and my mother used a word she does not usually use, and we ate it anyway. It was fine.

The car is cold at first, the seats cold through the good clothes. The windows fog as soon as we are moving, and the children plan out loud where they will check first when they get home, as if they have not already seen the whole yard from the driveway. The ham is in the oven, the house is empty, and the street is quiet the way a holiday street is quiet.

Church is cold. April church is always cold, the way a shut-up house is cold, and the lilies on the steps are pale, the way forced flowers are pale. Inside there are more lilies, and the choir robes smell like the back of a closet, and the light comes through the windows in colored squares on the carpet. My niece sits between her mother and me and draws the egg hunt on the church bulletin with a pen she found in the pew. The drawing looks like a field of stripes, and I keep it in a drawer.

On the way out, a man at the car says spring has not read the calendar. I nod. The parking lot is wet, and the children run ahead because the car is warm, and nobody mentions the eggs because the eggs have happened and there is ham coming.

The Table

We come back to a house that has finished itself while we were gone. The windows are steamed, the timer is going off, and the ham has pulled away from the bone, which is what it does when it is right, my mother says. She carves. The slices fall into the juices, and the glaze comes off in sheets that catch the light from the window.

The table is set with the good china: the deviled eggs dusted with paprika, the potato salad in the yellow bowl, the rolls under a cloth, the ham on the board at the head of the table. It is a color arrangement on purpose — pink ham, white potatoes, yellow eggs, green salad. It looks like what the baskets looked like that morning: careful and bright and arranged for company.

At the table my brother says the missing egg is out there growing a beard in the grass. "It will turn up in June," he says, "when we are out pulling weeds." It is the kind of thing he says, and it is probably true. I pass the ham and say nothing.

We eat too much, and then the children go back outside in their good clothes, and by afternoon the grass has dried enough that the knees of their pants come home clean. The neighbor's boy goes home holding his basket in both arms, and it is somehow fuller than when he arrived. The adults stay at the table with coffee and the leftover rolls. The windows are open. The house smells like the ham and the cold and the day.

The Gutter

The egg turns up in June, and a storm brings it. There is a storm in June — the kind that fills the gutters in an hour and leaves the street loud with running water. I am standing at the end of the driveway watching it when I see the green plastic half-buried in the wet leaves at the curb. It is the egg. I know it the way you know the last slice of a loaf.

It has been in the gutter since Easter, not in the grass where I lost it but in the road between, carried by April rain and held in the silt. I pick it up. The plastic is scratched, and the green has gone pale where it rubbed against the curb. It is heavier than it should be.

Inside, the jelly beans have dissolved into pink sugar that sticks to the seams of the plastic, and the chocolate rabbit has gone soft and then hard and then soft again — a wrapper with a face on it, holding a smear that used to be a rabbit. I stand over the gutter in the wet heat and open the egg like a question I already know the answer to.

I throw it in the trash can by the garage. The lid comes down over the green plastic and the pink sugar and the rabbit that never got eaten. The gutter is still running. The yard is deep and green, the way grass is in June, and the grass has long since closed over the spot where the egg was hidden. The spot is just yard now, high summer grass with the day's water still on it.