The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

What he left us

I need to be careful how I tell this part, because it is not the point, but you will want to know and it matters to the rest.

Walt Bickford left my daughter and me his house.

Not a mansion. I want to be clear. It is a white two story farmhouse on eight acres out on Bickford Road, with a wraparound porch and a windbreak of old cottonwoods and a garden plot gone to grass that Eleanor used to keep. It is worth something, but the worth of it to me was never the number. It was that after fourteen years of month to month, of one broken water heater away from disaster, my girl and I had a paid-for roof that no landlord could ever take. He left us the little he had saved, which was enough to fix the furnace and put something aside for Josie’s schooling and finally, finally breathe. And he left us his name spoken well, in a county where the Hollister name had spent fourteen years being spoken over us.

For a woman who walked out of her father’s house at eighteen with one duffel bag and a baby not yet born, I will tell you, that is a fortune. That is the whole treasure.

We buried Walt on a Thursday. Half the county came. He got a lawman’s send off, deputies from three counties, the works. Josie stood up front with me because Sheriff Reyes asked her to, and when they folded the flag they had draped for his service, Tom Reyes carried it over and put it in Josie’s arms.

I did not think that day could hold one more thing. I was wrong.

The Hollisters come around

You did not think my parents would stay gone through all of this, did you.

News travels in a small county faster than any road. A retired sheriff, beloved, leaves his whole estate to a fourteen year old girl and her single mother, and there is a funeral with three counties of deputies, and the girl gets handed the flag. That is the kind of story that gets told at every coffee counter and church basement from here to the state line. And somewhere in there, one of the tellings reached the big house on the far side of the county, and my mother and father learned that the granddaughter they had thrown away had just become the most talked about, best thought of child in Ardell.

Two weeks after the funeral, a car I did not recognize came up my gravel road. A nice one. My mother got out of it in her good coat, and my father behind her, older than I remembered, grayer, and they came up the walk to the porch of the little house we were still living in while we got Walt’s place ready, and my mother arranged her face into something warm and said, “Della. Sweetheart. It has been too long.”

Sweetheart. Fourteen years of nothing, and now sweetheart.

I stood in my own doorway and I looked at the two of them. And I want to tell you something, because I think a lot of you have a version of these people in your own lives. I did not scream at them. I did not throw the word stain back in my mother’s face, though Lord knows I had carried it long enough to have earned the right. Cold does more than hot ever will, and I had learned cold from a master.

I just asked them a question.

“What’s her middle name,” I said.

My mother blinked. “What?”

“Your granddaughter. Josie. She’s fourteen. You’ve lived twenty miles from her since the day she was born. Tell me her middle name.”

My father looked at the porch boards. My mother’s warm face came apart at the seams a little, and she said, “Della, that is not fair,” and I said, “No. It surely is not. It never was.”