The Pies On The Station Steps

Before the light

I bake in the dark. I have for so long now that my hands know the kitchen better than my eyes do.

Two pies every Saturday night. I set them on the windowsill over the sink to cool, and I go to bed, and I get up again at three.

By four I have them wrapped. One clean dish towel around each tin, the corners tucked under so the heat stays and the crust does not sweat.

My name is Ellen. I am sixty-eight years old. I have lived in the same white farmhouse outside the town of Delphi my whole married life.

The road into town is six miles of gravel and then a mile of blacktop past the grain elevator. I could drive it with my eyes shut, and some mornings it feels like I nearly do.

I park on the side street by the firehouse. Station Nine, the Delphi Volunteer Fire Department, a low brick building with three bay doors and a flagpole.

I carry the two tins up the four concrete steps and I set them down against the door where the night man will find them.

I touch the cold concrete once. I say a short prayer. Then I go home before the sun comes up over the elevator and anyone is the wiser.

I have done this every Sunday for twenty-six years. I never knocked. I never left a card. I never signed my name.

For twenty-six years, no one at that firehouse knew who the pies came from.

That was the whole point of it. A thing you do for the Lord does not need a signature on the bottom.

I want to tell you why I started. And I want to tell you what happened the Sunday they finally found me out.

But I have to start with a January night a long time ago, because none of the rest of it makes sense without that.