The Casserole Dish That Comes Back in September

The casserole dish comes back in September. It is a nine-by-thirteen pan of tempered glass, and on the underside of its rim a strip of masking tape carries a surname written in black marker. The supper is over, the folding tables are being wiped down, and at the end of the serving line the dishes are stacked, every one of them turned so the underside shows: white strips and grey strips, some with the corners lifting, each strip a name and a house.

The glass is old enough to have gone faintly amber at the corners, the color of tea strained a hundred times. Oven heat has dulled the shine of it to a softness new glass does not have. The bottom is webbed with fine scratches, the marks of a table knife drawn across the surface to loosen something that had baked on, and crossed by the pale track of a serving spoon. The pan has no handles; what a hand finds is the rim, worn smooth the way a door frame is worn smooth. Thumbs have held it going down the basement stairs, one hand under the warm bottom, the other on the rail, every September as long as the tape has carried a name.

The tape is the working part. A single strip of masking tape, cut straight with scissors and pressed over the seam at the base of the rim, the surname centered on it so it can be read while the pan is held upside down at chest height. Dishwashers have curled the ends and greyed the paper; the marker has blurred in places and been written over. When the tape stops sticking, somebody peels it off, dries the glass, and lays a new strip in the same place. The glass under the tape stays paler than the rest of the underside, because no water and no heat reach it there, and the faint edge of every older tape can still be traced around it. The handwriting shifts a little each time the tape is renewed. The surname does not.

In September the dish goes out for the first time since spring. All summer it has sat on the shelf above the sink, clean and empty, the tape turned to the wall, keeping its name to itself. The night of the supper it is filled, carried to the church in a cardboard box, and set on the serving table. It comes back the same evening, empty and washed, and returns to the shelf with the marking facing the wall again.

At the stack of returned dishes, the tape is what does the finding. A person walks the line, turns a dish over by its rim, reads the underside, and lifts out the pan that belongs to them. A dish with no tape sits unclaimed while the room clears. A dish with tape is back on its own shelf before the last folding chair is stacked.

The dish is nine by thirteen inches of tempered glass, faint amber at the corners, web-scratched on the bottom, the rim worn smooth by hands on the same errand every September. Near the edge of the underside, where the thumb goes, is a strip of masking tape, grey at the ends from heat, and the surname on it, written over twice in black marker, is legible.