The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

The morning I thought I would lose everything

At twelve minutes past five in the morning, somebody started pounding on my front door.

Not knocking. Pounding. The kind of heavy, flat-handed banging that goes straight through the walls of an old farmhouse and lands somewhere in the middle of your chest. I sat up in the dark before I was even awake, my heart already going too fast, my hands already cold.

I live at the end of a gravel road outside Ardell, a small farm town in the middle of Nebraska where the nearest neighbor is a quarter mile off and the only thing that usually wakes you at that hour is a calf that got out or a storm coming across the flats. Nobody pounds on your door at five in the morning to bring you good news. Every mother knows that. It is a thing your body knows before your mind does.

I pulled back the curtain in the front room, and there in the gray half light I saw a county sheriff’s cruiser parked in my drive with its lights running, and two men in uniform standing on my porch. Both of them armed. One of them had his hat off and was holding it against his chest.

My knees almost went. I want to tell you I stayed calm, but I did not. I stood there in my nightgown with my hand pressed against the cold glass and every terrible thing a mother can imagine ran through me at once.

Because the only person in that house besides me was my daughter. And she was fourteen years old, and she was the best thing I have ever done, and I could not think of a single reason two armed deputies would be on my porch at dawn that did not end with my whole world coming apart.

Let me back up. You need to know who we are first, or none of the rest of it will land the way it did on me.

My name is Della and my whole life is one girl

My name is Della Pruitt. I am thirty two years old. I clean rooms three mornings a week at the Ardell Motor Lodge out on the highway, and I do the books for two local outfits on the side, and in the summer I sell tomatoes and sweet corn off a card table at the end of the drive. It is not much of a living, but it is honest and it is mine, and I have kept a roof over my daughter’s head every single day of her life without asking one soul for help.

My daughter’s name is Josie. I had her when I was eighteen.

I know exactly what people thought when they did the math on that. I grew up on the far side of the county, and my folks are not poor people. My father, Ronald Hollister, runs one of the biggest grain operations in three counties, thousands of acres, elevators with his name on the side, a seat on every board that matters in this part of the state. My mother, Carol, keeps the kind of house you are not allowed to actually live in, and she cares about one thing above all others, which is how the Hollister name looks to everyone else.