A Pie for Every Thousand Dollars

The Last Pie

He did not say anything at all, in the end. There was truly nothing a man could have said standing in the middle of all that.

He only stood where he was. And one after another, thirty-eight families filed past that long dessert table, and every one of them took home a pie.

And every one took home the plain true story that came with it. You cannot argue back against a pie. There is nothing there for a man to take hold of and fight.

That was the smartest part of the whole thing she did. She never stood up and accused him. She set the arithmetic out in apple and pecan and let the neighbors carry it home.

By the time the hall had thinned back out and the ladies had started folding the long tables down, I noticed there was one lone pie still sitting there.

Apple. Her very best one of the whole four days. The crust finished the way Daddy liked it, with raw sugar scattered across the top before it ever went in the oven.

I figured she had simply miscounted somewhere, tired as we both were, and I opened my mouth to tell her so.

“No,” Mama said, before I could get it out. “That one there is his.”

“His? Donnie’s?”

“I counted thirty-eight for the money,” she said. “And I made the one more for him. I always make the one more. You have known that about me your whole life.”

And I did know it. She has made one more of everything her whole life. One more place at the table. One more plate covered in foil, just in case somebody came.

She carried that last pie out to the gravel lot herself, in her own two hands. She would not let me take it, and I knew better than to ask twice.

Donnie’s truck was parked off by itself under the one tall light pole. He had slipped out ahead of the rest of us, too tore up inside to stay for the singing.

The cab sat empty. He was off a little ways in the dark by the fence line, standing the way a man stands when he does not want to be seen standing anywhere at all.