The Secret Ingredient

                                      by Cecilia Kennedy

Curry powder spills from the bottle when I open the spice drawer. I should probably replace it, but I don’t. I’ll use every last bit, even the parts that cake up under the lid, when I shake it over the soup stock, which is in big demand to this day—every family reunion, every potluck. It’s no secret. The winning recipe was published ages ago, but no one saved it. Recipes abound, remedies abound—someone’s got to have the secret formula for the saving salve, the extra EpiPen for the little girl in Andsprit County, who was allergic to walnuts, but when the time came, the kitchen drawer was empty, except for a few walnut shells—and my parents had to find the neighbors, several miles down the road.

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          The Sweet Michigan Cherry Pie Sweepstakes Champion added a dash of almond extract to her recipe. That was it—and she won. The Twisty Bar Chocolate Champ added toasted walnuts to the brownie batter—and that was enough to declare her a winner. So when I saw the call for the Cozy Chicken Noodle Soup Cook-Off, I knew just what to do: I added one new ingredient, curry powder. It made all the difference in the world—the difference between first and second place.

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          “Send a Little Love” comes through in an email online, late at night. It’s a chain letter of sorts, which I haven’t seen in years. They used to come in the mailbox when I was growing up—mostly threats of bad luck if you didn’t send the letter to at least ten other people. I open the message online. No threats. Just a proposal: Send recipes to three people you know by forwarding the email on. I choose my daughters and my sister. They could use my chicken noodle soup recipe, so I send it, with curry powder still stuck under my nails, a fluorescent yellow, sprinkling away as I type.

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          Sometimes, I see shadows walking past my window. Sometimes, I hear the door downstairs, open on its own. The drawer in the kitchen rattles, and I think I see footprints in the morning, but I live out in the country. No one would come out this far, to open the kitchen drawer.

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          The messages come pouring in: Someone’s used my credit card. Someone’s tried to take loans out in my name. I’m so busy entering new passwords and opening new bank accounts that I hardly hear the knock on the door. But I do hear something, so I go downstairs and open the front door to find a bowl of soup left on the front porch. There’s no note attached—just a bowl of chicken noodle soup—and when I taste it, I recognize that whoever prepared it, did something different. They added saffron threads and thickened it slightly. And then, I remember whose recipe this is: the second-place winner’s, made with saffron and walnuts.

With my breath already beginning to catch in my throat, my tongue just beginning to swell, I race to the kitchen to find that the curry powder is missing, along with the EpiPen—and all the neighbors are so far away.