The Honor Box on Our Highway Corner

Rodney Pfaff waited until I had six pies in my arms, still halfway to my stall, before he walked over with his coffee and told me the new price.

It was the first Saturday in August, a little after seven in the morning, and the sun was already warm on the gravel lot outside his pole building.

The big doors were rolled open. Folks were carrying in tomatoes and sweet corn and egg cartons.

“Marla,” he said, “I’ve got to bring your stall up starting next week.”

He said it pleasant, the way a man tells you the price of diesel went up, and he did not look at me while he said it.

I asked him how much. I figured five dollars, maybe ten. Everybody’s costs had gone up that year, ours included, and I would not have argued about ten dollars.

“Two hundred,” he said. “Two hundred a Saturday, same as it would be for a commercial outfit. That’s what the space is worth to me now.”

I thought I had heard him wrong. I had been paying twenty dollars a Saturday since the first week of June, the same twenty as the egg lady and the man with the honey and the two sisters who sold crocheted dish rags.

“Is everybody going to two hundred?” I asked him. I kept my voice low, because Mrs. Inez Wolter was already coming across the lot with her purse on her arm, the way she did every Saturday at seven fifteen.

Rodney took a drink of his coffee. “Your stall is the one that’s changed,” he said.

“You’re doing a lot of business out of my building, Marla. It’s only fair the rent follows the business.”

He went back inside to his own table, which sat just inside the big doors where everybody had to walk past it.

He sold cinnamon rolls, sheet cake by the square, cookies in bags, and pies he bought frozen from a wholesale outfit in Kansas City and baked off in a convection oven in the back.

I want to be fair to him, because I have had a long time since then to think about it. His pies were not bad.

They were the kind you buy for a funeral lunch when you don’t have time. But by August, mine were gone by ten o’clock and his were still sitting there at noon.

Mrs. Wolter set her purse on my table and looked down the row of pies the way she always did, like she was reading a hymn board.

She was 79 that summer. She had buried her husband, Thad, the winter before, after fifty-four years.

“What did Rodney want?” she asked me. She had sharp eyes. She had taught fourth grade in our county for thirty-one years, and there was not much that got past her, then or now.

“Just business,” I said. I did not want to put it on her.

I handed her the cherry pie I had set back for her, the one with the lattice top, and she paid me her fifteen dollars out of a little coin purse with a clasp.

She bought a pie every week. She told me once it wasn’t that she ate a whole pie.

It was that Thad had loved cherry pie, and on Sunday afternoons she cut a slice and set it at his place at the table while she listened to the ball game on the radio.