The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

Walt

Walter Bickford was eighty four years old, and by the time Josie came into his life he had run all the way out of people.

He had been the sheriff of our county for almost thirty years, back before I was born. Everybody older than fifty in Ardell has a Walt Bickford story. He was the kind of lawman they do not make anymore, the kind who would drive a drunk teenager home and have a talk with his father instead of writing him up, the kind who knew every road and every family and every dog by name. He and his wife Eleanor never had children. When Eleanor passed, about six years back, Walt just sort of folded up. His body outlasted everybody he loved, which is its own quiet kind of cruelty, and he ended up at Cedar Grove with a window that looked out on the water tower and not one visitor to his name.

Then a wheat-haired girl started coming by on Tuesdays.

Josie did not tell me much about Walt at first. She just started mentioning him, the way you mention a friend. Walt says the coffee here is an insult to coffee. Walt used to have a dog named Buck that could open the truck door by himself. Walt says I remind him of somebody. I did not think a lot of it. I was glad she had made a friend, even one seventy years older than her.

I did not understand until later how much those Tuesday visits had come to mean to that old man. How he would ask the nurses on Monday if it was Tuesday yet. How he kept a butterscotch candy in his shirt pocket for her every week because he had noticed she liked them. How the only time the staff ever saw Walt Bickford smile anymore was when a fourteen year old girl came through the door and called him by his first name like they were equals, which, to her, they were.

Forty pies

One Sunday last month, Josie came home from Cedar Grove quiet. Not sad exactly, just full of something. She sat at the kitchen table turning a glass of milk around and around and finally she said, “Mom. I want to bake.”

“Alright,” I said. I wiped my hands on the dish towel. “How many?”

“Forty.”

I laughed. I thought she was pulling my leg. We do not have forty of anything in this house except maybe worries.

She was not pulling my leg.

She told me that one of the women at the home, a Miss Ada who was ninety one, had gotten to talking that afternoon about her mother’s apple pie, and had said, so plain it broke Josie’s heart, that she could not remember the last time she had tasted a real homemade dessert. Years, she thought. Maybe not since Eleanor Bickford used to bring them around, back before. Everything at the home came out of a big commercial can or a plastic sleeve. And Josie had looked around that dining room at all those folks and thought, every single one of them has somebody who used to bake for them, and every single one of those somebodies is gone.

“It makes people feel remembered,” she told me. “A pie you can tell somebody actually made. It says somebody thought about you.” She looked up at me. “There’s forty two people at Cedar Grove, Mom. I want to make enough for everybody. And a couple extra for the nurses.”

What are you going to say to that. What kind of mother says no to that.

I did the math on the money, because that is what being poor teaches you to do first, do the math before you feel the feeling. Forty pies is a lot of apples and a lot of flour and a lot of butter and a lot of sugar, and it was going to eat most of what I had set aside that month. I said yes anyway. I have gone without plenty of things in my life. I was not going to let my daughter go without this.