I was sixteen, trembling outside the DMV, and Lena found me. She was my neighbor, not family, but she came anyways.
She pulled a crumpled validation ticket from her coat and put it in my hand. 'For luck, honey,' she said. 'I don't need it anymore.'
She smelled like Vicks VapoRub and bacon grease. Her fingers were knobby from years of scrubbing floors in the oil company trailers.
The recipe card stuck out of her apron pocket. Kolaches. The paper was soft as cloth, stained brown around the edges from butter and years of use.
I passed that test. I still have the ticket. It's tucked behind the card now, in a tin box on my dresser.
Lena died two years later. That card is the only thing I have of hers that still smells like her kitchen.
Every time I make kolaches, I hold the card and remember what it means to have someone believe in you when you don't believe in yourself yet.
My husband of forty-one years says I make them better than Lena did. I never tell him he's wrong.