The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

Mrs. Sutton did not say anything. She is not a woman who says much. She reached over and took hold of my wrist with both her hands, hard, the way you would take hold of a porch rail, and held on.

I had eleven blue ribbons on my kitchen wall, and not one of them had ever done a single thing for a living soul but me.

That is what I thought about, driving home with the windows down.

Lowell came up the gravel again the first week of August. That time he came all the way up on the porch.

“The board met,” he said.

“I expect it did.”

“We are keeping the rule. Three years and sit out one. I think it is a good rule, Vernice.”

“So do I.” I pushed the porch swing with my foot. “There were four pies on that table, Lowell. I scared off ten. I did not mean to, but I did it.”

He turned his cap. “There is another thing. The home economics teacher from Caldwell County is retiring off the judging. We need a third judge for baked goods next July. Somebody that knows a crust. It pays fifteen dollars and a meal ticket. Darrell made the motion. It was not unanimous,” he said, honest to the last, “but it carried.”

I pushed the swing twice more.

“Yes,” I said.

Kayla called the Tuesday after the fair. Donna had given her my number.

She came out that Saturday with the baby, whose name is Emma, and a glass pie plate still in the sack with the price sticker on it. She came every other Saturday from then till Thanksgiving. I stood her at my elbow the way my mother stood me. I did not touch the dough. That is the hard part of teaching, keeping your own hands in your apron pockets.

Her first three crusts were poor. The fourth one, she picked the glass plate up off the rack and looked at the bottom, and it was the color of a saddle, and she set it down on my counter and put both hands over her face.

Emma learned to walk on my kitchen linoleum that fall, between the table and the deep freeze. She took her first steps hanging onto two of Buck’s fingers. He has not been the same since.

In April, a year to the week after her mamaw passed, Kayla carried a blackberry pie over to Lyon County and ate it with her granddaddy at his table. She told me he got through one bite and had to go stand on the back porch.

In June she brought me the fair entry form to look over. She had filled it out in ink.

Class 14, fruit pie, two crust. Exhibitor: Kayla Marsh and Vernice Tate.

“You cannot put me on there,” I said. “I never touched it.”

“The rule says you cannot enter a pie. It does not say I cannot write down who taught me.” She had her chin up. She has got a chin on her, that girl. “I asked Mr. Pratt. He read the premium book twice.”

“Kayla, I am judging.”

“He said you would know what to do about that.”

I did know.

The last week of July, on a Wednesday, I went through the gate at eight in the morning with a judge’s badge on a string. The Hobbs boy waved me through, and that time I let him.