The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

So when I turned up pregnant at eighteen, unmarried, by a boy who left town before Josie ever drew a breath, my parents did not see a scared girl who needed her mother. They saw a stain.

That is the word my mother used. I have never forgotten it, because you do not forget the day your own mother looks at you across the good dining room table and calls you a stain on the family. My father did not even look at me. He looked at the wall behind me and told me that if I chose to keep the baby I could not expect them to be a part of it, because they would not have their name attached to my mistake.

I chose the baby.

I packed one duffel bag and I walked out of that big cold house and I never once went back to beg. They did not come to the hospital. They did not send a card. My father drove past me at the co-op one time when Josie was a toddler on my hip, and he looked right through us both like we were fence posts. For fourteen years the Hollisters have lived twenty miles from their only grandchild and have never so much as learned her middle name.

I raised her alone. No backup. No safety net. Just the two of us and a lot of long days and a stubborn kind of love that would not quit.

And somehow, out of all that, I got Josie. And Josie turned out to be the kindest person I have ever known.

The kind of girl who gives too much

I cannot take full credit for how Josie came out. Some of it is just who she is, the way she came into the world already tender toward every hurting thing.

When she was seven she gave her winter coat to a boy at school who did not have one, and walked home shivering and would not tell me why until I found out from his mother. When she was ten she organized the other kids to fill shoeboxes for children at the shelter over in the county seat, and she ran the whole thing herself off a spiral notebook. Last spring she spent six Saturdays helping out at the animal rescue out on Route 9, coming home smelling like wet dog and happier than I had seen her all year.

Sometimes, honestly, it scared me. I would watch her hand the last of her allowance to somebody or give away a thing she loved, and I would want to grab her and say, save some for yourself, baby, the world does not always pay you back. But I never did. Because that tenderness was the truest thing about her, and I was not going to be the one to teach her to close it off.

She is fourteen now. Freckles across her nose, hair the color of wheat that will not stay in a braid, hands that are always doing something for somebody. She started volunteering at the Cedar Grove home last fall, the little nursing home right on the edge of Ardell where a lot of the folks have nobody left. She would go after school and read to them, or just sit and listen, because it turns out what most of those old people want more than anything is for somebody young to sit still and listen to their stories.

That is where she met Walt.