The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

What the sheriff came to say

He took his hat all the way off when he stepped inside. So did the two young deputies. Three armed men standing in my little front room at dawn, taking their hats off, and one of them a boy no older than twenty who was already having to blink hard.

I put Josie on the couch and sat beside her and held her hand and I said, “Just tell us.”

Sheriff Reyes sat down heavy in my one good chair and turned his hat around in his hands a couple of times, the way men do when the thing they have to say is bigger than they are.

“Walt Bickford passed away last night,” he said. “In his sleep. Peaceful. The nurse said he’d had the best day he’d had in years, and he went easy sometime after two in the morning.”

Josie made a small sound and put her free hand over her mouth. I put my arm around her.

“I’m awful sorry to bring you that at this hour,” the sheriff went on. “I truly am. But there’s a reason it had to be me, and it had to be now, and I need you to hear the whole of it before you decide to be sad.”

He looked at Josie then, right at her, the way Walt used to.

“Walt Bickford trained me,” he said. “Forty years ago that man taught me how to wear this badge. He was the finest lawman and the finest human being I ever knew, and when Eleanor died something in him just quit. We all watched it. He stopped talking. Stopped eating half the time. The last few years, honest with you, I dreaded going to see him, because there wasn’t much of Walt left to see. He was just waiting.”

He swallowed.

“And then last fall a girl started coming on Tuesdays.”

I felt Josie go still.

“You brought him back,” the sheriff said. “I don’t have a softer way to say it. The whole staff at Cedar Grove will tell you the same thing. Last Tuesday of every month he’d have the nurse call me, and it was always the same, ‘the Pruitt girl came again, Tom, wait till you hear what she said.’ Six months you gave that man. You gave him something to be awake for.”