Grandma Elsie’s Rhubarb Custard Pie

“I’ll make her one,” I said. “I’ll bring it up Saturday.”

“No,” Pam said. “Let me. Would you write it down for me? I want to make it for her myself. I want to do something for her with my own hands. Does that make sense?”

So that night I sat at the kitchen table and took out Grandma’s recipe box, the green tin one with the rooster on the lid, and I copied it all out on the back of one of her old blank cards.

I did not just copy the recipe. I wrote down everything she had ever told me. Light on the rolling pin. Let the rhubarb sit fifteen minutes. One spoon of orange peel, and do not tell anybody.

At the bottom I wrote: “This is Grandma Elsie’s. Make it with love for Doris. K.” I remember that I drew a little heart, which I have not done on anything since I was in high school.

Pam cried when I gave it to her. She held that card against her chest in my shop like it was a letter from somebody who had died, and said, “Kathy, I do not know what I would do without you.”

She made the pie. Doris ate two bites in her hospital bed and told Pam it was just like she remembered.

Pam called me that night from the hospital parking lot to tell me, and she was crying again, the good kind.

So when I heard “her own rhubarb custard” over those box fans, the first feeling I had was not anger. It was more like missing a step in the dark. Your stomach goes before your mind catches up.

The anger came later, in the truck. Dean drove home the back way, past the Lutheran cemetery, and I looked out at the corn and felt something hot climb up the back of my neck.

“You going to call her?” Dean asked. He kept his eyes on the road. He knew better than to look at me just then.

“I’m going to try,” I said. “I want to hear her say why. There has to be a why. Thirty years, Dean. She doesn’t do things like this. Not to me.”

“No,” Dean said. “She doesn’t.” And that was all he said, but he said it like a man setting a fence post, so I knew he meant it and had thought about it.

I called Pam that night. It rang until the machine picked up. Pam still has a machine, the kind with the little tape, because Doris gave it to her.

I called the next morning. Nothing. I called again Sunday after church, and once more on Monday from the shop between a perm and a beard trim. Four calls. She never picked up, and she never called back.

Tuesday I drove by her house on my lunch hour. Her car was in the drive. The kitchen curtain moved. I sat in my car for a full minute with the engine running, and then I got out and knocked.

Nobody came. I knocked again. I stood on that porch, where I had stood a thousand times with casseroles and birthday cakes and bottles of wine, and nobody came to the door.

Thursday came. Her standing appointment. Ten o’clock. At eight thirty my phone at the shop rang, and it was not Pam. It was Pam’s neighbor, Barb, calling for her to say she would not be able to make it.