The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked
The letter
Sheriff Reyes reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out an envelope, soft and creased like it had been carried a while, with one word on the front in a shaky old hand. Josie.
“Three weeks ago,” he said, “Walt called me out to the home. Had me bring Harlan Pruett, the lawyer, no relation to you folks, different spelling. Said he wanted to fix his affairs while his mind was still all the way his. He made me promise two things. First, that if anything happened to him, I would come tell you in person and not let it be a phone call or a stranger. He was real particular about that. He said, ‘That child is going to be scared to death when she sees a cruiser in the yard, Tom, so you get out there yourself and you tell her fast that she didn’t do anything wrong.'”
I put my hand over my mouth. Even dying, that old man had thought about how it would look, how it would land on a fourteen year old, and had tried to soften it. That is the man he was.
“Second thing,” the sheriff said, and he held out the envelope to Josie. “He asked me to put this in your hand myself. Not the mailbox. Your hand.”
Josie took it with both of hers like it might break. She looked at me. I nodded. She opened it, and she read it out loud in a wobbling voice, and I will give it to you the way she gave it to us, because I have it memorized now, we both do.
Josie. If Tom is reading you this it means I finally went and joined my Eleanor, so do not you dare be sad on my account, I have been trying to get there for six years. I need you to know something. Before you came I was done. I had made up my mind to just quiet down and go. Then a girl I never met walked in and sat down and listened to an old man’s stories like they were worth something, and I remembered they were. You gave me back my last year, and it turned out to be a good one, on account of you.
I have not got any family left in this world to leave things to. I have got a house, paid for, out on Bickford Road, the white one with the porch that Eleanor and I lived in fifty one years. I have got a little put by in the bank, not a fortune but real. And I have got a name in this county that still means something. I am leaving all three to you and your mother.
Your mother raised you right in a world that did not help her one bit, and I know some of that story because Tom told me, and I will say this plain: the people who threw her away threw away the best thing they ever had a claim to, and they are the poorer for it, not her.
Bake your pies, girl. Feed the lonesome ones. There is more of them than anybody admits. And when you are grown and somebody young sits down and listens to you, you will understand what you did for me.
Your friend always, Walt Bickford.
By the time she finished none of us could see. That young deputy just turned and faced the wall.