The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

I told the women at bridge club her lattice crust looked like a rail fence after a flood, and they laughed, and I felt the little rush of it all the way home.

In 2003 I followed her pickup up the county road one August morning, because I wanted to find her chokecherry patch. I thought it was a secret.

I sat two hundred yards back with my engine off and watched her pull over beside the cemetery fence and start picking in plain view of the road.

It was a public patch. Hester had never hidden one thing from me in her life, and I had spent a morning spying on her like she was a criminal.

And every year, on the Saturday of fair week, when the judged pies were cut up and sold by the slice at the bake auction for the junior livestock scholarship fund, I bought Hester’s.

I told myself it was for the scholarship. I would carry that slice out to the tailgate of Bernard’s truck and eat it in four bites with a plastic fork, trying to take it apart on my tongue.

Chokecherries are the hardest fruit in Montana to make a decent pie from. They pucker your mouth like a green persimmon, and most people end up with something fit for a punishment.

Hester’s pie tasted like the first cool morning in September. I never found out how she did it, and I ate her slice every August for thirty years trying.

I should have caught on. It took me until I was seventy-one.

Now I have to tell you about 2011, because if I skip it, nothing else in this story is worth anything.

That year, for the first time, I put my name down as a volunteer clerk in the Home Arts building. I told myself it was civic duty. The real reason is that clerks check in the entries and stand near the judging, and I wanted to be nearer the pies. That is the kind of woman I was.

Emmett had a stroke that summer, a bad one. He was in the hospital in Missoula, ninety miles away, and Hester was driving back and forth every day.

Everybody in the valley knew. I put my name on the church prayer chain and prayed for Emmett, and I will say plainly that I meant it.

It’s just that the part of me that prayed for Emmett and the part of me that wanted Hester’s ribbon did not seem to know each other.

On the Thursday morning of fair week, Hester did not appear at the entry table at seven the way she always did. Instead, a little before nine, a neighbor boy dropped off her pie, still warm in its carrier, with her entry tag already filled out in her tidy cafeteria handwriting.

She had baked it at four in the morning before driving back to the hospital.

I took the tag in my hands, and I saw she had written the wrong class number.