Grandma Elsie’s Rhubarb Custard Pie

The man from the bank leaned into the microphone in the exhibit hall, and I heard him say it plain as day over the box fans: “Best pie, and the $500 anniversary prize, goes to Pam Schultz, for her own rhubarb custard.”

Her own. I was standing by the quilt rack with a paper cup of lemonade, and Dean was beside me in his seed cap, and for a second I thought I had heard it wrong.

I had not heard it wrong. Pam walked up past the jars of bread and butter pickles in her good white capris, and Mrs. Arndt, the judge, pinned the blue ribbon on her blouse herself.

There was a photographer from the county paper. He had Pam hold the pie up beside her face. It was my grandmother’s pie. I knew it from forty feet away, the way you know your own child in a crowd.

You can tell a rhubarb custard from across a room if you grew up on one.

The top goes golden and a little puffed, and the pink shows at the edges where the custard sets around it. Grandma’s always had a sugar shine on top.

Pam’s had the sugar shine. Of course it did. I had written that step out for her myself, in blue ink, on the back of one of Grandma Elsie’s old index cards, at my kitchen table in June.

Dean found my hand. He did not say anything. He has been married to me for twenty-nine years and he knows that sometimes the worst thing you can do for a woman is ask her if she is all right.

I clapped. I want that on the record, since I am going to tell the rest of this honestly.

I clapped for my best friend of thirty years while she held up my grandmother’s pie and said thank you into the bank man’s microphone.

Then I went and looked at the judging card, because I could not help myself. They post them by the entries after the ribbons go out. Mrs. Arndt has the neatest handwriting in the county.

“Flaky crust, custard set perfectly, lovely orange note. A true heritage pie.” That is what it said. And at the top, in Pam’s own hand, on the entry tag: “Pam Schultz. Original recipe.”

The orange. That was the thing that got me. Nobody ever guesses the orange.

Grandma put one spoon of grated orange peel in the custard, and in seventy years I never knew a soul who could name it on the first bite.

Mrs. Arndt named it. She has been judging pies at our fair since before I could see over the table, and she found Grandma’s little secret in one forkful and wrote it down and gave it to somebody else.

I am Kathy Jorgensen. I am fifty-two. I cut hair for a living in a town of about four thousand people in northern Missouri, in a little shop on the square with two chairs, a dryer that sounds like a cement mixer, and a coffee pot that has never once been empty.

I kept my maiden name when I married Dean. People used to ask about that.

My dad had no sons, and Grandma Elsie took my hand at my wedding shower and asked me if I might keep the Jorgensen going a while longer. So I did.