The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

I will not lie to you and say I felt nothing. It was not that she had won. Somebody had to win. It was that the judges had cut their sliver out of it, the way they do, and turned the cut side to the front, and from twelve feet I could see that bottom crust. Pale as a fish belly. Wet clear through. The filling had slid out over it and pooled.

A blue ribbon, on a soggy bottom.

Buck saw me looking. He saw what I saw. He has eaten enough pie to know.

“Don’t,” he said, quiet.

“I was not going to say a word.”

“I know you were not. I am saying do not even think it loud.”

I took the dollar and cut the slice.

People went in and came out. I heard one woman say, “Well, look who won with Vernice out of it.” I heard another say, “Bless her heart, look at the bottom of that thing.” Neither one said it low enough.

And I saw the young mother.

She was standing right beside her own blue ribbon, and she was not smiling. She was looking at the cut side of her pie. Then she looked up through the propped door and straight at my card table, at the slice I was just then lifting onto a plate, and how it came up clean in one piece with the bottom crust brown and stiff as a shingle under it.

She looked at mine. She looked at hers.

Then she unpinned the ribbon from her own entry tag.

She came out the door with it in her hand. She did not get in the line. She walked up the side of it to the end of my table, where Lowell had stood, and she waited there with the baby chewing on her collar until I had finished with the man in front.

“Mrs. Tate?”

“I am.”

“I am Kayla. I am the one that…” She held the ribbon up a little and let it drop. “They gave me this.”

“I saw. Congratulations.”

“Don’t,” she said, and her chin went. “Please do not be nice about it. I heard them in there. I know it is only because you were not in it. And I saw the bottom when they cut it. I have got eyes.”

The line had gone quiet. Thirty people can get awful quiet.

“I am not trying to be smart with you,” she said. “I just want to know. Will you tell me what I did wrong?”

What went through my head was not all Christian.

Part of me wanted to say, you did not do anything wrong, honey, you won, go and enjoy it. And let her carry that raw-bottomed ribbon home and never know. It would have sounded like kindness. It would have been the meanest thing I ever did.

I looked at her. She was shaking a little. It takes something to walk out in front of a line of people and ask that. It takes more than it took me to set up a card table.

“How bad do you want to know?” I said.

“Bad.”

“Then come around here. Buck, take the knife.”

Buck took the knife. Mrs. Odom, who misses nothing, was already coming across from the 4-H table.

Donna’s children had half a sack of flour left from their biscuit demonstration. They had shortening in a can, which would not do. But my own lard tin was in the little cooler in the Buick, wrapped in a wet towel. I carry it out of thirty years of habit, in case a crust cracks on the ride and wants patching. Donna sent one of her boys running for it.