The Pie War That Saved Our Fair

Delphine tapped her pen on the clipboard. “I’ll give the contest one more year,” she said. “Fifteen entries, minimum, verified sponsors to cover the ribbon cost, and the kitchen in this building has to pass inspection, because right now that oven trips a breaker every time somebody runs two racks at once. Fifteen entries. Somebody organizes it properly this time, start to finish. Not just showing up in August with a pie and a grudge.”

She looked right at me when she said grudge. Then, God help me, she looked right at Vernon.

“Fine,” Vernon said. “I’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it,” I said, at the exact same second, because apparently my mouth had decided this was the week to run the whole show without consulting me first.

Delphine looked back and forth between us like she was watching a tennis match played by two people who had never seen a racket. “Wonderful,” she said, in a voice that suggested it was not wonderful at all. “The two of you. Together. I’ll expect a plan by the Fourth of July.”

That is how, at the age of sixty six, I ended up co-chairing the Hickory Flat pie contest with a man I had spent a dozen years quietly resenting over crust technique.

We did not speak for four days after that meeting. Then Vernon showed up on my porch on a Tuesday evening with a toolbox in one hand and a look on his face like a man reporting for jury duty. “That Grange kitchen oven’s been tripping since the Bush administration,” he said, by way of hello. “First one, not the second one. I know electric. Figured I’d start there since neither one of us knows the first thing about getting fifteen strangers to enter a pie.”