Grandma Elsie’s Rhubarb Custard Pie

Dean did not mind. Dean farms beans and corn on four hundred acres with his brother, and he said a name was a small thing to give a woman who had already given him her best pie recipe and a set of cast iron.

Grandma Elsie lived in this house before we did. She planted the rhubarb patch out back by the clothesline in 1951, the year she married my grandpa, and it still comes up every April like it has someplace to be.

I learned that pie at her counter when I was eight years old, standing on a red milk crate so I could reach.

She would put her hand over mine on the rolling pin and say, “Light, Kathy. You are not mad at it.”

The rest of the lessons came in pieces, over years. Cut the rhubarb small. Toss it in sugar and flour and let it sit. Beat the eggs but do not whip them. Nutmeg, a little. Then the orange.

“Why the orange, Grandma?” I asked her once. I must have been ten. She gave me the look she saved for questions she found charming and a little foolish.

“Because rhubarb is sour and custard is sweet,” she said, “and somebody has to introduce them.” Then she laughed at herself, and I laughed with her, and I have never once grated an orange since without hearing it.

She took that pie to every funeral lunch, every new baby, every barn that burned and every family that lost a man to a tractor or a heart attack.

Half the county ate Elsie Jorgensen’s rhubarb custard at the worst moments of their lives.

That is why I am telling you all of this. It was not a pie.

It was seventy years of my grandmother showing up for people. That is what I had copied out for Pam on the back of that card.

Pam Schultz and I met in seventh grade, the first week of school, when she got gum in her hair on the bus and I was the girl who knew to use peanut butter.

I worked it out with my fingers in the girls’ bathroom, and she cried and said I had saved her life.

We have been best friends since. I was in her wedding and she was in mine.

I held her hand when she lost a baby in 1999, and she sat with me in the hospital the whole night my dad had his stroke.

She sat in my chair every other Thursday for thirty years. Ten in the morning, a trim and a color, and the whole week’s news. I know the color of her roots better than she does.

So when her mother got sick last spring, I knew about it before anybody. Pam’s mother is Doris. Doris Hoffman.

She taught second grade for thirty-five years, and half the people in this town learned to read on her carpet square.

Doris had a bad fall in May, and then pneumonia on top of it, and then they found her heart was not doing what it ought to.

She was in and out of the hospital in Chillicothe most of the summer.

Pam came in for her Thursday in early June looking like she had not slept in a month. Which she had not.

Her husband, Rick, had moved out in March. He took the good truck and the dog and a woman from Brookfield.

“Mom keeps asking for that pie,” Pam said that morning, while the color set. “The one your grandma used to bring to school things. The rhubarb one. She says she can taste it when she closes her eyes.”