Who wants to trade sandwiches?

I boldly called out. 

They looked down.

Silence.

Sunday morning

“Let’s go for a drive,” Robert called to me from the kitchen as I was slipping on rubber garden shoes, ready to tackle my to do list. I pulled off my shoes, grabbed us a snack and followed him to the car.

We’d heard about the famed grilled sardines of Vila Nova de Milfontes, put it in the GPS and headed up the Algarve’s west coast.

From the parking lot, we could see the spread of sand, the overlaps of sea meeting river, people wading, their pants hems pulled out of reach of occasional waves. I scanned the shoreline for the shells and stones my jeweler friend had found there

Nearby stood a wooden shack, sea air worn, blue smoke swirling through a silver chimney that poked through the roof. We created a path across sand, aiming toward the scent of fresh fish grilling.

We paused at the grills and watched the grill master stoking the fire, turning fish far larger than the sardines we knew from tins. 

We were led to our seats. The restaurant was packed with Sunday lunch families, platters of sardines on their checkered tablecloths, conversations lively, fingers glistening, bits of charcoaled skins hanging on. 

From our seats overlooking the shoreline, salty air drifted across our eyelids, our lips.Through the wide windows, we watched beachcombers moving along the shore.

When loaded plates from the grill arrived, we pulled a few onto our plates and took tentative bites. No sooner had they hit our tongues than we grabbed napkins and let our mouths’ contents drop into paper, wrapped and out of sight.

Sunday drives were a thing in my childhood. So were Sunday stacks of sandwiches. 

Sunday.

My father looked down at the kitchen counter, his lanky frame in flannel plaid and forest-fire scented khakis, ready. It was Sunday, a day for long drives in the family mustard-colored station wagon, our first car with seat belts. But first, there was work to do.

The builder of breakfasts and the week’s sandwiches, my father assumed his role with enthusiasm. A palette of ingredients spread before him, he paused and studied the options, playing with all the possibilities. One by one he laid out slices of Rhodes wheat bread, the kind you buy frozen and bake at home, which of course couldn’t be sliced as evenly as Franz or Snyders white bread, the kind we kids wished to find in our lunchboxes.

The adventure of new tastes at hand, he mixed and created stacks and stacks of sandwiches, enough for all 3 of us kids and himself to last the week. 

  peanut butter with brown sugar

  peanut butter with raisins

  peanut butter and banana slices

  peanut butter and drizzles of honey

  cheddar cheese with pimentos on sandwich spread, the oozy kind with pickles

  pre-sliced olive loaf with sandwich spread

  canned sardines on yellow mustard

Each sandwich was wrapped in waxed paper as if it was a precious Christmas gift, a folding method I can still recreate in my sleep as if my hands had done it hundreds of times too.

Each morning, our lunchboxes were lined up and filled, one sandwich each from one of the freezer stacks. An apple, a thermos of milk. Then the lids closed, clasps snapped into place. My father’s pail was like a silver corrugated barn, tall and slender like him, a leather handle across the top. Mine, a restored no-nonsense one found at a thrift shop, was rectangular and sturdy, painted grey over cartoon images, with red trim.

Off we went to school carrying the unknown contents of the day’s sandwich. Lunchtime came and seated at the lunch table surrounded by my nine classmates, I dared open my lunchbox, my eye landing on a smudge of mustard peeking through the waxed paper. Gingerly I pulled it out, pushed my lunchpail ahead a bit so I could open my sandwich somewhat out of view. 

Did anyone ever relieve me of my day’s lot? Not that I recall. And each day I had to get rid of the evidence that I hadn’t eaten more than the fruit and milk. My walk home from school took me past a field, just before the corner church that was across the street from our house. A perfect place to launch uneaten sandwiches. 

My father walked the same route home from his office and one evening happened to see my sandwich split open from the toss, not far from the field’s edge. He scooped it up, reassembled it and brought it home. “Mary Kathryn!” I heard his voice sharper than usual. When I ran to the kitchen and saw what he was holding, I looked away. I swallowed hard. “Eat it now,”  he said. I glanced at the remnants in his hand, the cheese now hardened, the bread’s crust curled, sandwich spread dry. Through blurred eyes, I reached out, bit down. My feet didn’t budge.

I was undaunted. I still had to get rid of those sandwiches somehow. So I began hiding them behind the hot water heater in the closet of the bedroom I shared with my sister.

One day when we were coming in from playing, I heard the call from our bedroom. “Mary Kathryn, get in here right now!” As the screen door shut behind us, whatever laughter we’d been carrying stopped. There, just inside our bedroom door, stood my mother, dust mop in one hand, and at her feet, stacks of still-wrapped green, moldy sandwiches.



I sometimes wonder if they ever talked about the sandwiches after I had gone to bed. If they laughed.