The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

The day we delivered them

I have thought about that afternoon at Cedar Grove more times than I can count.

We wheeled those pies in on a flat cart the janitor lent us, and word went ahead of us down the hall the way it does in a place like that, and by the time we reached the dining room half the home had rolled and shuffled and walked in to see. Forty two homemade apple pies, still warm, one for every soul in the building.

And they cried. I am not being dramatic. Old men and old women who had not had a real dessert or a real visitor in longer than they could say, sat there and wept over a slice of apple pie made by a fourteen year old girl who did not want a thing from them. Miss Ada held Josie’s face in both her papery hands and could not get a word out. The nurses were wiping their eyes and trying to pretend they were not.

Walt was at the end, by the window. Josie brought his over herself, on a real plate, and cut into it for him because his hands shook too much for the fork some days. He took one bite and he stopped, and he set the fork down, and this old sheriff who had faced down every hard thing this county could throw at a man for thirty years took Josie’s hand in both of his and held it like it was the last warm thing left in the world. He did not say anything for a long while. Then he said, so soft I almost did not hear it, “You bake just like she did.”

Eleanor. He meant Eleanor.

Josie sat with him a long time after everyone else had gone back to their rooms. I did not rush her.

On the drive home, I kept sneaking looks at my girl in the passenger seat, tired and content and smelling like cinnamon, and I thought, whatever else I have gotten wrong in this life, I got you right. I did one thing right, and it was you.

That night she hugged me at the top of the stairs, harder and longer than her usual. Into my shoulder she said, “You never gave up on me.”

“Never,” I said. “Not for one single day.”

And then it was five twelve in the morning and somebody was pounding on my door.

The longest thirty seconds of my life

I want you to be in that hallway with me.

I came down the stairs in the dark holding onto the rail because my legs would not work right. Josie came out of her room behind me, hair a mess, whispering, “Mom? Mom, what is it?” and I told her to stay back, and of course she did not, she came right down and stood behind me with both hands fisted in the back of my shirt the way she used to when she was small and scared.

Every awful thing was in my head. Had she done something. Had somebody said she did something. Had one of those old people taken a turn and somebody was blaming my girl. In a town this small a good name is the only thing you have got, and I did not, and the Hollisters would love nothing better than to be proven right about me and mine.

I turned on the porch light and I opened the door about six inches, on the chain.

Two deputies. And behind them, coming up the porch steps slow, a third man in a sheriff’s coat, older, gray, with his hat in his hand and held against his chest. I knew that face. It was Sheriff Tom Reyes, who had been Walt Bickford’s deputy thirty years ago and had his job now.

“Della Pruitt?” he said.

“Yes.” My voice came out like a stranger’s.

“Ma’am, is your daughter Josie here?”

I felt her grip tighten on my shirt. My heart went straight down through the floor. “She’s right here,” I managed. “Sheriff, please. What is this. What did she do.”

And Tom Reyes, that big weathered man, his eyes went soft and wet in the porch light, and he said the words I will hear for the rest of my life.

“Ma’am, she didn’t do anything wrong. Can I come in and talk to you both about what your daughter did yesterday. It’s important that you hear it from me.”