The Pecan Pie at the Soup Kitchen

Walt and Mark

When we came back in, Sister’s clicker said a hundred and nineteen. Walt was at the dessert end, on his fifteenth pie.

Mark walked straight down the outside of the serving line, past the turkey and the dressing and the green beans, and stopped in front of him. I stayed back. This was not mine to do.

Walt set the knife down. He did not wipe his hands this time. He just stood there and waited, the way he must have waited at the bottom of a hundred poles for the man above him to call down.

“Mr. Brandvold,” Mark said. “I’m Carol’s son. Mark.”

“I know who you are, son.”

“I said some things about you to my mother. I don’t know what she told you.” He swallowed. “Whatever it was, I said worse. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

The Lutheran couple on dessert had gone very still. The lady in the choir sweatshirt, who had finished eating and come back for coffee, was standing two feet away and not pretending otherwise.

Walt looked at him for a long moment.

“I lost my dad when I was twenty-four,” Walt said. “Lineman, same as me. Fell off a pole in Le Mars in a sleet storm. My mother got remarried six years later to a man who sold seed corn. I didn’t speak to him for two years.”

Mark stared at him.

“Then he taught me how to fix a carburetor,” Walt said, “and I figured out he wasn’t trying to take anything. He was just trying to stand next to it.” He held out his hand. “Apology accepted. You want to cut pie? I’ve got three left and my hand’s about to give out.”

Mark looked at the hand. Then he took it.

“I don’t know how to cut a pie,” he said.

“Eight slices,” Walt said. “Start with a cross. Don’t saw it, let the knife do the work. And you lift the first piece slow, or it falls apart and you’ve got nothing to show for it.”

I went back to turkey. Darla gave me my tongs back. I put on fresh gloves. My hands were shaking and I did not let anybody see.

Owen and Lily sat at a long table with the young mother and her three boys in orange caps and ate pecan pie and talked about the parade. Jen helped the college girls with coffee.

And at the end of the serving line, my son cut the last three of Darlene Brandvold’s pecan pies into twenty-four slices, not quite even, with a retired lineman standing at his elbow saying, “That’s it. That’s it. Slow.”

At two o’clock Sister Mary Agnes stood up from her folding chair and held up her clicker.

“A hundred and forty-two,” she announced. “Two over. God is good. Start the to-go boxes.”

Everybody clapped. I don’t know who started it. Maybe it was me.