The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

We ate it in silence. It was a good pie, and it was tough.

“It’s a good tough,” Bonnie said, and I laughed for the first time that day. Then I put my head down on my knees in the fairgrounds lot, and she rubbed my back the way you would rub a child’s, in circles, and said nothing at all.

On Sunday evening, after the fair closed, Bonnie drove the two ribbons out to the home place where Emmett ran cattle. I did not go with her. It was not mine to go.

She called me at nine on Monday morning, and I picked up before the second ring.

“Kaylene says she gave her mother both of them at the kitchen table,” Bonnie said. “She told her everything I told her, word for word. Hester didn’t say anything for the longest time. Then she turned the new blue one over, looked at the back of it like she was checking a crust, and said one word.”

I held on to the counter.

“What word?”

“Grate,” said Bonnie. “Kaylene doesn’t know what it means. She said her mother said it twice.”

I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand.

Your hands run warm, hon. Mine run cold.

I did not understand it yet, and I knew better than to count on it. But I knew it was not “tough,” and I knew it was not “no.”

“Bonnie,” I said. “What is Hester’s middle name?”

“Mae,” she said. “Why?”

“I’ve wanted to know for thirty years.”

After we hung up I put a stick of butter in the freezer, and I took the box grater down from the shelf over the stove, and I set both of them on the counter where I could see them.

Then I took the pencil down from the nail by the pantry door and looked at the tally for a long time. All those little marks in Bernard’s hand, and then in mine. H and I. H and I. Thirty years of it.

I rubbed out my mark for 2011 with the eraser end and gave it to her. H sixteen. I thirteen.

Under the last line, small, the way you write a name on the back of a photograph, I wrote the one thing I had never known about her.

Mae.

I will be in the Home Arts building next August, on the Thursday of fair week, at ten till eight, with a pie carrier in each hand. I will set one on table nine in my usual spot. I will ask Bonnie to leave the square of white paper on my left exactly as it is.

And somewhere between now and then, I mean to find out what a person does with frozen butter and a grater.

Bernard would have said it was a pie.

It was never a pie.