The tin
By eleven the fruit pies were gone. Eight of them, at twelve dollars each, gone in two hours. Quincy had sold more corn in one morning than he had sold in the two weeks before. I could tell by the way he kept glancing at the can.
There was a lull, the way there always is near noon, when people are home eating dinner. Quincy sat back down on his tailgate. I sat on the wagon tongue. Zeke was in the shade under the maple, eating an ear of raw corn like an apple, which Elsie used to let him do.
I got up and went to the cooler in the bed of our truck. I took out the last pie, still wrapped in the towel, and I carried it over to the tailgate and set it down beside him.
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I did not say anything. I peeled back the towel.
He saw the tin before he saw the pie. I watched him see it. That dent in the rim, the one his boot had put there in 1994. His face went completely still.
Then he lifted the edge of the foil and saw that it was sugar cream. Her birthday pie. The one she never sold.
He did not say anything for a long time. A grain truck went by on the county road and blew dust over the both of us, and he did not even blink.
“She’d have been sixty-five in two weeks,” he said finally. His voice was rough. “I forgot. I didn’t forget the day. I forgot she’d be sixty-five.”
“I know,” I said. “Sid told me.”
“She’d have made one of these.”
“I know. That’s why I did.”
Quincy put his hand flat on the top of the foil, the way you’d put a hand on a dog’s head, very gently.
“I backed into your wagon,” he said.
“I was there,” I said.
“I did it on purpose.” He did not look up. “I saw your sign Tuesday morning, five dollars, and I saw three cars at your wagon and none at mine, and I thought, she’s taken Elsie’s cards and she’s taken Elsie’s road and now she’s going to take the stand too. And I just put it in reverse.”
He took his cap off and turned it in his hands. His hair under it was flat and gray and damp.
“That’s not who I am,” he said. “Or it wasn’t. I don’t know who I am since March. I go out to the machine shed and I sit there.”
“Quincy,” I said.
“I dumped two hundred dollars of your corn in the ditch in front of my grandson,” he said. “And you come and set your wagon by my table and split your money with me and bring me her pie.” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what to do with that.”