Stephen King: Cookie Jar

“Are you serious?” Dale’s eyes were shining.

“As a heart attack, kiddo. Anyway, all her distractions finally stopped working. Her uke, dancing with her shadow, the map on the wall, the playing cards over the wall sockets. Her stories stopped working for her, too. Because the thing she was afraid of was in the house with her all along.”

“What? What was she afraid of?”

“She was afraid of the cookie jar.”

After his wife’s funeral, George Alderson told his three sons that he was going to empty the little house to the walls—sell what could be sold, and throw away the rest. But before he did it, he took them there and invited each of them to take one thing to remember her by. Jack chose the ukulele, and eventually learned to play it. Peter—a much quieter and less argumentative boy in the wake of his mother’s untimely death—took the watch George had given her when she left for the little cottage. It was a man’s watch, and she had worn it around her neck, like a ticking locket. Rhett took the blue ceramic cookie jar.

He kept it under his bed, and each night he and Jack ate a couple of the cookies—to remember her by, Rhett said. Pete was not invited in to share this ritual, and did not even know about it, because by then he had his own room. Although neither of the younger boys said so aloud, they felt Pete had no right to share in their cookie communion. He had mourned their mother after she was dead—strenuously—but had mostly turned his back on her while she was alive, sneering at the playing cards propped over the baseboard outlets and calling the map of Lalanka “goofy shit.”

“He loved her,” Rhett told his great-grandson, “but we felt he didn’t love her enough. We were just kids, remember, and kids can be awfully judgmental.” He paused, thinking. “Although in some ways, I still think we were right.”

There came a night—it might have been a week after Moira Alderson’s suicide, it might have been two—when Rhett and Jack Alderson shared a realization that should have come earlier, and would have, if their powers of observation hadn’t been numbed by grief. They were sitting on Rhett’s bed, the cookie jar between them.

“Whoa, Nellie,” Jack said. “It’s still full. How can that be?”

Rhett had no idea, but it was true. They had taken a lot of cookie communion since their mother’s death, but the jar was still packed to the rim. On this particular night, the ones on top were macaroons. When Rhett stirred them aside, he saw chocolate chippers beneath. He started to burrow deeper to see if he could find the oatmeal-raisin cookies that were his personal favorites, but Jack grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand out.

“Don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it might be dangerous. Put the cover back on and stick it under your bed.”

Rhett did so without argument, and Jack put out the light. They lay there in silence for awhile, neither sleepy. Rhett could feel the cookie jar underneath him, a small, dense planet with its own gravitational pull.

“It’s like her ghost is in there,” Rhett said finally, and his eyes filled with the tears that were always waiting since their mother had died.

“It’s not her ghost, that’s stupid,” Jack said. Rhett could tell from the thickness of his voice that his brother was crying, too.

“What, then? Is it something to do with Lalanka? The forza? The…” It was hard to finish, because they were what he feared the most. “The gobbits?”

“Santa Claus isn’t real, and neither are the gobbits or the forza mist, Rhett. None of that jazz is real. The map was just made up out of her head.” Jack was trying to sound tough, but his voice was still thick. “She knew it, too. It was all just stuff she made up to keep her mind off the cookie jar.”

“Then what’s in there?”

“Cookies. And I don’t want anymore. I never want to eat another cookie in my life, not from that jar and not even from the bakery.”

A week passed. The cookie jar stayed under Rhett’s bed with the lid on. Then one night—it was a Saturday—Rhett was jerked back from the edge of sleep by the sound of his brother crying.

“Jack?” Rhett sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“We would have gone over there today,” Jack said. “We would have had bacon sandwiches, and played Clue. I miss her. I miss Mom.”

“I miss her, too.”

Jack got out of bed, ghostly in his white pajamas, and sat down next to Rhett. “I was thinking of how her place smelled. How good it smelled.”

“Like cookies,” Rhett said. “That’s how it always smelled. It was like a fairy-tale house that way, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “only she was a good witch instead of a bad one.”

They sat there for a little while, not talking, remembering the smell and her shadow dancing on the wall. How gone she was had finally gotten through to them. Even the map was gone, with the Long Forest and Lookout Hill and Castle Black and Castle Red. Their father might have said it belonged in a gallery when she was alive, but when she was gone, he scrubbed it away like a shopkeeper scrubbing a dirty word off the front of his store so his customers wouldn’t be offended. He certainly couldn’t sell the house with that crazy thing on the wall, he told the boys. It had to go. He took pictures of it first, but Kodak snaps weren’t the same. Couldn’t be.

“Get the jar,” Jack said.

Rhett pulled it out from under the bed with relief, and cradled it in his lap. Jack lifted the cover. It was still full to the brim, but it was no longer macaroons on top. That Saturday night it was ginger snaps.

“She’s been gone almost a month,” Jack said. “They’ll be stale.”

But they weren’t stale; they were as fresh as if they had been baked that very day.

Moira had cut her wrists and died in the bathtub on a hot August afternoon. Rhett and Jack discovered the cookie jar was always full right around the time school let in again. Halloween came, and Rhett went trick-or-treating by himself for the first time. He dressed as a pirate and came home with a bag of candy, but it wasn’t very much fun without Jack, who had declared himself too old to put on a costume and go traipsing around the neighborhood begging for sweets. Thanksgiving came, and their father—now showing strands of gray at his temples—carved the turkey. Pete’s girlfriend ate with them, and Pete ate with her family at Christmas. They became engaged on Valentine’s Day of 1939, shortly after Pete turned eighteen. Summer came again, and Rhett spent most of it at the vacant lot down the street, playing baseball. Sometimes he pitched, even when there were bigger kids on the team. He had a great fastball.

Jack occasionally watched him, but rarely played. Mostly he went places by himself, usually with a sketchpad under his arm—he had inherited his mother’s artistic ability, and then some.

“He might have been one of the great ones,” Rhett told Dale. “Probably not, most kids never fulfill their potential, but we’ll never know.”

The lives of the two younger boys began to draw apart, slowly and subtly, but surely. Yet they still shared the same room, at night they took cookie communion, and the blue ceramic jar was always full, the cookies inside always fresh. Sometimes they were chocolate-covered grahams, sometimes they were sugar cookies, sometimes they were macaroons or chocolate chippers. They ate one or two apiece, sitting on Rhett’s bed, more than a thousand cookies in the course of that long year before Pete got married and Jack moved into Pete’s room.

By then Hitler had begun to dominate the news, and it seemed that in each day’s paper more of the map on the front page was stamped with Nazi swastikas. Europe was pretty much gone, and England would be next.