Two Lawn Chairs at the Flagpole

I did not say anything. I leaned on my rake and looked at the hills.

“Next year,” Troy said, “I’m taking the day off. Both of them get a seat. Your mom and mine. And I’ll make sure both of them get that picture, if I have to take it myself.”

“That would be good,” I said. “That would mean a lot to her.”

“And Kendra’s going to drive out to Oak Hill,” he said. “She asked me where your mom lives. She wants to apologize to her in person. She wants to learn how to make those pies.”

Kendra did drive out. She went on a Sunday afternoon in November, after church, by herself, and Mom told me about it on the phone before supper.

They sat in Mom’s front room with coffee. Kendra said she was sorry again, properly, looking Mom in the eye. Mom told her that she had been forgiven before she ever got in the car.

Then Mom took her out to the kitchen and showed her how to soak the apples, and cut the lard into the flour, and crimp the edges with a fork the way her own mother had done it.

“She’s not much of a cook,” Mom said, and I could hear her smiling. “Her first three came apart in the skillet. But she kept at it. She’ll get there.”

“Mom,” I said, “do you really forgive her? After what she said to you?”

“Bethany,” Mom said, “that girl came forty miles to say she was sorry to an old woman she barely knows. That’s more than most people manage. Of course I forgive her. That’s the easy part.”

“What’s the hard part?”

“The hard part is she’s got to keep showing up,” Mom said. “Same as I told her. That’s the only way a child ever learns who loves him.”

That afternoon at the school, when the bell rang and the doors closed behind the third grade and the lawn went quiet, I folded up the two green chairs and Mom stood by the flagpole holding her pie tin.

It was empty. Twenty four pies, forty eight halves, and not a crumb left in it but a little sugar in the corners. She tipped it toward me so I could see.

“Well,” she said, “I believe that’s the first time in four years he didn’t take any home in his lunchbox.”

“You can make more,” I said.

“I’ll make more,” she said. “I’ll make more every year until the Lord tells me to quit.”

She shook the towel out over the grass for the birds, and folded it, and laid it in the bottom of the tin.

Then she walked back across the lawn to the car with her visitor sticker still on her cardigan, right over her heart.

She wore that sticker home. She told me later she stuck it on the inside of her kitchen cabinet door, next to Mason’s kindergarten handprint.

The pie tin went home empty.