The Honor Box on Our Highway Corner

I sold out that morning by a quarter to ten. I folded up my tablecloth, put the money bag under the seat, and drove the eleven miles home with the window down and Rodney’s number sitting in my stomach like a stone.

I should tell you who we are, so you know the size of this. My name is Marla Jessup. I was 48 that summer.

My husband, Dwight, is 52, and he raises soybeans and feeds out hogs on the ground his granddad bought in northern Missouri in 1946.

We live at the end of a gravel road that runs a mile and a half south off Highway 6.

It’s a two-lane state highway with not much on it but grain trucks, school buses, and folks driving to the county seat for groceries and the doctor.

I have baked pies since I was nine years old, standing on a chair in my grandmother’s kitchen. I never thought of it as a business.

It was what you took to the church dinner, to the family with the new baby, to the house where somebody had died.

Our daughter, Callie, is the one who talked me into the market. She was 19 and doing her second year at the community college, home most weekends.

She said, “Mom, people already ask you for pies. You might as well let them pay you.”

So I read up on it. Missouri lets you sell baked goods from a home kitchen under the cottage food rules, as long as you sell straight to the customer and label it.

Every box got a little sticker with my name and address and the line saying it came from a home kitchen the state had not inspected.

I stuck to fruit pies and pecan. No cream pies, no pumpkin, nothing that needs to sit in a cooler, because the rules don’t allow those, and I wasn’t about to make anybody sick over fifteen dollars.

Fifteen dollars a pie was the price we settled on. Callie worked it out at the kitchen table with a calculator and my grocery receipts.

Butter, flour, sugar, fruit, the boxes and the stickers came to a little over six dollars a pie. Pecan ran closer to eight.

On a good Saturday I sold sixteen pies. That came to $240.

Take out the ingredients, the gas to town, and the twenty for the stall, and I cleared about $120 for two days of baking.

It was not a fortune, but it paid our propane in winter and then some.

Two hundred dollars a Saturday did not need a calculator. It meant I would be paying Rodney Pfaff for the privilege of baking his customers my pies. That was the whole of it.

Dwight came in for dinner at noon that day. On a farm, dinner is the noon meal, and supper is at night, and I have never been able to train myself out of saying it that way.

He had been fixing a waterer in the hog barn and had grease to his elbows.

He washed up at the sink and sat down to his ham sandwich, and I told him the number. He did not say anything for a while.

Dwight is not a talker. He chewed, and he looked out the window at the beans, which were still green and knee-high then.

“Did you ask him about it?” he said finally.

“I asked if everybody was going up,” I said. “He said mine was the stall that had changed.”

I set his iced tea down a little harder than I meant to. “He’s priced me out on purpose, Dwight. He doesn’t want my pies next to his.”