The Pie War That Saved Our Fair
Contest morning came in hot and bright, the kind of Missouri August morning where the cicadas start up before the coffee’s even finished dripping. I got to the Grange hall at six to find Vernon already there, sleeves rolled, setting out name cards in his crooked handwriting, and for a second, before he noticed me in the doorway, I watched him check and recheck the little cluster of extension cords running to Hoyt’s borrowed roaster oven like a man checking on a sick calf. Twelve years I had built him up in my head as nothing but a rival with a grudge and better hands than me for lattice work. Standing in that doorway, watching him fuss over an oven that wasn’t even his, for a contest that wasn’t even his own to save, I understood for maybe the first time that Vernon Stroud loved this fair the same fool, tender way I did, and had just never had cause to say so out loud to anybody, least of all to me.
“You’re up early,” he said, not turning around.
“Somebody’s got to keep an eye on that fire hazard,” I said.
He almost smiled. Almost.
The morning ran the way most fair mornings run, which is to say half chaos and half miracle. Two pie plates arrived cracked from the drive over gravel roads, and Vernon produced replacement plates out of his truck like a magician, because of course he had thought to bring spares. A little girl from the youth division cried because her meringue wept in the heat, and Junie sat down next to her on a hay bale and told her that weeping meringue was practically a rite of passage, which I am fairly sure she got straight from me, though she said it better than I ever have.
Junie’s own pie, a peach and blackberry number she’d built off a base my mother taught me forty years ago and a lattice technique she’d clearly stolen back from her grandfather without him noticing, sat cooling on the youth table looking, if I am honest, better than anything I had entered that year. I did not tell Vernon that. I let him find out himself, standing over that table with his hands on his hips and an expression I will remember until they put me in the ground, half pride and half pure astonishment, like a man watching his own name written in somebody else’s handwriting.