The Wages I Counted at His Table

Mama and the Pie

It was Mama who did the next thing, and I did not see it coming.

She had made two pies, a cherry and a sour cream raisin that is Daddy’s favorite, the one she only makes for him. She stood up from her end of the table and picked up the cherry and the pie server, and instead of starting at the head where Daddy sits, the way she has started every meal in that house for forty years, she carried it around the long way and set it down right in front of Cole.

“You boys cut first today,” she said. “You worked for it.”

And she cut Cole the first slice, and then Dillon, and then she put a slice in front of Bridger near about the size of a hymnal and said, “You eat all of that, honey, you’re nothing but a rail.” And only then did she take the pie on around to Daddy’s end.

Now you have to understand my mother. She has never in my life said a cross word to that man in front of company. She has backed him at every table and every church and every funeral for forty years, right or wrong, because that is the kind of woman she was raised to be. She did not say one word against him that Sunday. She did not have to. She just passed the pie to the hired boys first, in her own kitchen, in front of all of us, and every grown person at that table understood exactly what she had said.

Daddy understood it best of all. I watched him watch her carry that pie the long way around, and I saw his face when she set the first piece down in front of Cole instead of him, and it was not anger. It was a man realizing the one person who had never once taken a side had just taken one, quiet, with a cherry pie.

He ate his slice of sour cream raisin and he did not taste it. I could tell by his face he did not taste it at all.