Summary

In King’s introduction to “Cookie Jar,” King admits he has no idea from where the idea for this story came.

In “Cookie Jar,” Chapter 1, Dale Alderson, Barrett “Rhett” Alderson’s great-grandson, visited Rhett at the Good Life Retirement Home to talk to him about what life was like when Rhett was a boy. It was part of a school project. For a while they talked about the old radio shows and cigarette commercials, but then Rhett told about his mother and a cookie jar she owned. He said the conversation was not to be part of the school project.

Rhett told Dale that his mother, Moira Alderson, had been “very, very peculiar” (396). When Rhett was two she moved out of the house where he lived with his father and two brothers to a cottage on the other side of town. She claimed...