The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

What I decided

Here is the part I am proudest of, and it is not the cold part.

My mother started to cry on my porch, and some of it may even have been real, and she said all the things people say when the ledger finally comes due. That they had been proud and foolish. That they had missed so much. That they wanted to make it right, wanted to be in Josie’s life, wanted to help, and my father said something low about setting up an account for the girl, and there it was, there it always is, the Hollister answer to everything, which is money and how it looks.

And I thought about Walt Bickford, who had nothing but a paid-for house and a good name and a butterscotch candy in his pocket, and who had given my daughter more love in six Tuesdays than these two had given me in thirty two years.

“I’m not going to keep Josie from you,” I told them. I meant it. “She’s her own person, and she’s kinder than I am, and if she wants to know her grandparents someday that’s her right and I won’t poison it. But she is fourteen years old and she does not need saving and she does not need your account. She has a paid-for house and a mother who never left. An old man she met by accident thought more of her in six months than her own blood did in fourteen years, and he is the one who took care of her. You need to sit with that. Both of you.”

My father looked up then, and for the first time in my whole life I saw something in his face crack that I did not have a name for. Shame, I think. Real shame, the kind that comes too late to fix the thing but is real anyway.

They did not come in that day. I did not invite them. But I did not slam the door either. I told them Josie decorates Walt’s grave every Tuesday now, out at the Ardell cemetery, around four in the afternoon, and that it is a public place, and if two people happened to be there some Tuesday and happened to introduce themselves to a girl and let her decide for herself, nobody could stop that.

Then I said good afternoon and I went back inside to my daughter.