Grandma Elsie’s Rhubarb Custard Pie

Mrs. Arndt came over before she left. She’s eighty-one now, and she walks with a cane, but she held herself straight and looked at Pam for a long moment.

“I’ll be writing a note to the fair board,” Mrs. Arndt said. “The paper should know too. The ribbon was for the pie, Pam, and it was a fine pie. But the card ought to say whose it is.”

“Yes ma’am,” Pam said. “I’ll call them myself tomorrow. I’ll ask them to print it.”

“The bank will want its prize money back,” Mrs. Arndt said. She didn’t say it unkindly. She said it like she was reading off a score.

“I know,” Pam said. “I never spent it. It’s in an envelope in my dresser. I couldn’t spend it. Every time I opened the drawer I felt sick.”

Pam called the paper the next morning, and the bank. The paper ran a little box on page two the next Thursday.

“Correction: The rhubarb custard pie that took best pie at the county fair was Elsie Jorgensen’s recipe, 1951. Entered by Pam Schultz.”

The bank took back its $500 and gave it to the furnace fund at St. John’s.

The bank president, a nice man named Tom, said it seemed like where it belonged. The furnace fund still never ends, but it ended a little less that year.

That Thursday at ten in the morning, Pam came into my shop. Her standing appointment. I hadn’t taken her name off the book. I had kept that hour empty for nine weeks.

She sat down in my chair. I put the cape around her shoulders and snapped it at the back of her neck, like I’d done six or seven hundred times before. Neither of us said anything. I started mixing her color.

“Your roots are terrible,” I said finally.

“I know,” Pam said. “I’ve been waiting for my hairdresser.” And then we both laughed so hard I had to put the color bowl down, and the lady under the dryer looked over at us like we’d lost our minds.

While her color set, Pam took something out of her purse. A little white box from the jewelry counter at the drugstore. She held it in her lap a while before she handed it to me.

Inside was the blue ribbon. The fair ribbon, with the gold lettering and the rosette. Best Pie. She’d folded it carefully on a square of cotton.

“I want you to have it,” Pam said. “It’s yours. It was always Elsie’s. I can’t keep looking at it.”

I held that ribbon in my hand for a long time. I thought about Grandma at her counter with her hand over mine.

I thought about Doris on her carpet square with a book open on her lap and all of us second graders around her.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got a better place for it.”

That Saturday, Pam and I drove to Chillicothe together. Doris was in a room on the third floor with a window that looked out on a parking lot and a row of maples.

“Kathy Jorgensen,” Doris said when she saw me. “You still have that cowlick.” She’d taught me in second grade too. Doris remembered every one of her students, even at the end.

I’d brought a pie. A rhubarb custard, of course, still a little warm, wrapped in a dish towel the way Grandma always carried hers. The nurse said Doris could have a bite or two.

Pam cut her a sliver and fed it to her on a plastic fork. Doris closed her eyes. “Oh,” she said.