The next August she walked in and set her pie on table nine, in its square, to the left of mine, same as always. She said, “Ivadelle.” I said, “Hester.” She did not say one word about the year before, not then and not ever, and neither did I.
For fifteen years I thought she was punishing me by winning, by being steady and quiet and showing up. It took me until this summer to see she was not punishing me at all. She was just baking.
Bernard died in January of 2019, of his heart, in the barn, between one chore and the next. He was seventy-three. I was left with the hay ground and a son in Spokane, Corwin, who calls on Sundays and sounds like he is reading from a card.
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I met Hester at the Town Pump, by the cooler, on the Fourth of July. She was in her gardening hat with a case of club soda under one arm, and I had a loaf of bread, and we both stopped dead.
She had come to Bernard’s funeral that January. She had sat at the back and left before the lunch, and I’d seen her coat going out the door. I had never thanked her.
“Ivadelle,” she said.
“Hester.”
“You’re entering this year.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Hester, my husband is dead, and I don’t think a pie contest is the sort of thing you need to bother me about.”
“I’m not going to win it off a woman who stayed home,” she said. She said it flat, the way she’d tell you what time the school bus came. “I’ve no interest in that. So you bring a pie, and I’ll bring mine, and one of us will lose. That’s how it’s done.”
I should have taken her hand. I said, “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”
And Hester Vold, whom I had insulted for twenty-three years, smiled. It was the first real smile she had ever aimed at me. It was as if I had given exactly the right answer.
“That’s the spirit,” she said, and went to pay for her club soda.
I entered. I won, as it happens. She clapped from the back of the room, slow, the way she always had, and for the first time in my life I clapped back, only I did it so hard and so stiff that anyone watching would have thought I was trying to hurt my hands.
The news came to me on a Tuesday in May of this year, in the checkout line at the Town Pump, from a girl behind the register whose name I never learned.
“You hear about Mrs. Vold?” she said, counting my change. “Stroke. In her kitchen. Kaylene found her on the floor. She’s up at the care center now.”
I said I hadn’t heard. I took my change and my bread and got in Bernard’s old Ford and sat there with my hands on the wheel.