The Unlabelled Dish

Delphine wanted to eat it. I would not let her. We had what I will politely call a discussion, in the kitchen, with the unlabelled casserole sitting between us like a third sister nobody trusted. Delphine said I had always been dramatic. I said a dish with no name was not a gift, it was a question, and I intended to know who was asking it. I peeled back the foil. It looked like every chicken casserole ever made in this county, golden on top, a little dry at the edges. But underneath the topping, when I dug in with a fork, there were no vegetables and no chicken. There was a layer of folded waxed paper, and inside the waxed paper, kept dry and clean, was a stack of photographs of Vernon Tilly that somebody had very much not wanted in his house while he was alive.