The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

The spot to the left of mine on table nine was nothing but white butcher paper, and I stood there at ten minutes till eight on the Thursday morning of fair week with a pie carrier in each hand and could not make myself set either one down.

For thirty years that spot had held Hester Vold’s chokecherry pie. Thirty Augusts, the same table, the same square of paper, her pie sitting two feet from mine like a dare. I had spent most of every July dreading that pie and most of every August trying to beat it.

Now there was just paper.

“Ivadelle, hon, you’re holding up the line,” Bonnie Ambrosch said, not unkindly. Bonnie has run the Home Arts building at the Pintlar County Fair for twenty-two years, and she carries a clipboard the way some women carry a purse.

Behind me a girl of maybe nineteen waited with a lemon meringue, and behind her stood a man with a jar of pickled beets in each fist.

“I’m thinking,” I said.

“About what? You’ve entered the same class since Clinton was in office.”

“I’ve got two pies.”

Bonnie looked at the carriers. Then she looked at me over the top of her reading glasses, and I watched her put it together, because Bonnie misses nothing that happens under that roof.

“One per class,” she said. “You know that.”

“I know that.”

“Then what’s in the other carrier?”

I did not answer her. I could not have, not without my voice doing something I did not care to have it do in front of a girl holding a lemon meringue.

Because the other pie was Hester’s. Not hers, exactly. Mine, baked the way hers was baked, built from nothing but thirty years of tasting. And the woman it belonged to could no longer lift a fork in her right hand, and I had not been to see her once.

I want to tell you how I came to be standing there. It is not a flattering story. Plain is the only way I know how to tell something I am ashamed of, so that is how I will tell it.

I came to Pintlar, Montana, in 1987 as Bernard Grubb’s wife, and for nine years I did nothing at the county fair but walk through the Home Arts building with my hands behind my back like a woman at a museum.

Bernard’s mother, Opal, had won the fruit pie class in 1961 with a huckleberry pie, and her blue ribbon was still pinned to the corkboard in her kitchen when she passed, gone soft and gray at the edges.

I decided I would carry it on. I was thirty-two years old and had never won a thing in my life but a raffle ham.