The Pecan Pie at the Soup Kitchen

Orientation

Sister Mary Agnes was about four foot eleven and somewhere past eighty. She wore a navy cardigan over her habit and walking shoes that squeaked on the linoleum. She shook my hand like she was testing it.

“Walt says you can stand on your feet for five hours,” she said.

“I stood in a middle school library for thirty-four years, Sister.”

“Then you’ll be fine. Middle schoolers are worse than anybody we get here.” She handed me a laminated card. “Hairnet. Gloves. Change your gloves if you touch your face, your phone, or money. You don’t touch anybody’s food with your hands. You don’t ask anybody why they’re here. You say good afternoon and you mean it.”

“Yes, Sister.”

She walked me through the kitchen. Three big ovens, a steam table with eight wells, a hand sink with a sign over it in red letters a foot high. The walk-in cooler was the same model as the one at our parish. I recognized the latch Walt had fixed there, because he had fixed this one too.

“We plan for a hundred and forty on Thanksgiving,” Sister said. “Some years more. We had a hundred and sixty-one the year the packing plant cut a shift. Plates go out from eleven to two, and then whatever’s left goes into to-go boxes for anybody who wants to take some home.”

“And the pies?”

She looked over at Walt, who was checking the gaskets on the oven doors without being asked.

“Walt brings eighteen pecan pies,” she said. “Eight slices to a pie. A hundred and forty-four slices. He’s never once come up short, and he’s never once let me pay for the corn syrup.”

The Recipe Card

The night before Thanksgiving I went over to Walt’s house to help bake.

He lived in a two-bedroom ranch on the north side with a chain-link fence and a bird feeder he filled every morning. Darlene’s African violets were still on the kitchen windowsill. He watered them on Sundays. He told me that the first time I visited, before I could wonder.

He had flour and sugar and dark corn syrup lined up on the counter like soldiers. Six dozen eggs. Twelve pounds of pecan halves from the farm stand out by Sergeant Bluff. Eighteen pie tins in three stacks.

“We’ll do six at a time,” he said. “Three batches. Oven’s slow on the left side, so we rotate at twenty minutes.”

Then he opened a drawer and took out an index card in a plastic sleeve.

It was an old card, soft at the corners, with a coffee ring on one edge. The handwriting was round and slanted, a woman’s hand from the days when they still taught penmanship. Across the top it said: Darlene’s Pecan Pie.

“She made these for every bake sale at the parish for forty years,” Walt said. “I never could do the crust right. Mine always shrank. She said I handled it too much.”

“Do you want me to do the crusts?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “I’d like that,” he said. “I think she’d like that.”

So I made eighteen crusts in Walt Brandvold’s kitchen while he chopped pecans and the radio played the Hawkeyes pregame show for a game that was not until Friday. I did not handle the dough too much. My mother taught me that, same as Darlene’s mother must have taught her.

Around ten o’clock, with the last six pies cooling on the counter and the whole house smelling like brown sugar and butter, I asked him about the card.

“Do you ever change it? Add anything?”

“Never had the nerve,” he said.

He did not say anything else about it. I did not push. Some things you leave on the counter until they are ready.