Five Cows and One Plate of Pie

Jan, who has waited that counter as long as I have been alive, came over with the coffeepot and looked at me and then at the door. “You want to sit, Kendra?”

“I’m waiting for somebody,” I said.

She nodded and set two cups upside down on their saucers in front of the empty stools and went back down the counter. I loved her a little for that.

It was twelve o’clock. Through the wall the auctioneer was selling a pen of steer calves, his voice running up and down, and somebody in the ring hollered, and the bids went on.

Twelve oh five. I could feel the room looking at me without looking at me.

I could feel the woman with the grocery cart, who was in the third booth with her husband, and I did not turn my head.

Twelve oh eight. I started thinking about what I would do if she did not come.

I thought I would probably buy a piece of pie and eat it standing up and leave, and that it would be the longest piece of pie in the history of the world.

Then the bell over the glass door rang.

Arlene

Arlene came in with her purse over her arm and her good wool coat buttoned to the neck.

She stopped inside the door and looked down the counter, slow, the way she had looked at her pasture on Saturday morning.

There was an empty booth by the window, the one Jan keeps for the older couples because it has the cushions.

Somebody near the door half stood up to wave her into it. Arlene nodded at him kindly and walked right past it.

She walked the length of that counter, past the cattle buyers and the haulers and the third booth, and she set her purse down on the counter next to me, and she climbed up on the stool like she had been sitting there every Wednesday of her life.

“Sit down, honey,” she said. “You look like you’re waiting for a bus.”

I sat. Jan came over with the coffeepot and turned our cups right side up and filled them and stood there with her pad, looking from Arlene to me and back. Everybody along that counter was waiting too.

Arlene did not pick up a menu. She turned on her stool, all the way around, so she was facing the room instead of the pie case, and she folded her hands on her purse.

“Jan,” she said, and her voice was not loud exactly, but it was the voice she uses to call cows in from the far side of a section, and it carried, “we’ll have two pieces of pie.”

“What kind, Arlene?”

“Whatever’s best today,” Arlene said. “And I’ll tell you why we’re having it, since everybody in here already knows half of it and has the other half wrong.”

The auctioneer kept going through the wall. Nobody at that counter so much as lifted a fork.