Then I drove home. I did not go to the care center. I did not call. I did not send a card, because I did not know what to write that did not begin with 2011.
I did nothing for fourteen weeks. I let them go by in the same county with a woman I had known for thirty years, because I was afraid of what her face would do when she saw me.
I would like to say I had a revelation, but what I had was a bad night, the thirteenth of August, a week before the fair. I stood in my kitchen at two in the morning looking at the tally on the pantry door, and I realized I did not know one thing about Hester Vold that was not about pie.
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I did not know her middle name. I did not know what she did at Christmas. I knew how she crimped her edges, and I knew how her chokecherry tasted in four bites, and I knew she never spoke ill of anybody. That was everything.
I knew her pie better than I knew her. Somewhere between two and three that morning I made up my mind to bake it, because I wanted, after thirty years, to be able to say I had understood her, at least in the one language we had.
If I ever walked into a room with her again, I wanted to have something in my hands.
So at four I took a flashlight and drove to the county road by the cemetery and picked chokecherries in the dark along the fence, where Hester had picked them in plain view of the whole county for thirty years.
I picked three gallons. I stood a while at Bernard’s grave, which is just up the hill, and told him what I was doing, and I could almost hear him say, “Ivadelle, it’s a pie.”
“I know,” I said.
It took me five tries. The chokecherry alone was too sharp, so I worked out a handful of sweet dark cherries off the produce truck from the Flathead.
Then I found the cloves, a pinch, so small you don’t taste it so much as sense it, like a person standing behind you. It came to me with a fork in my mouth at six in the morning, and I said out loud, “Cloves,” like a woman who has found her car keys in the freezer.
The filling was right. I would have sworn to it. But the crust was wrong. It was a good ordinary crust, and it was mine. Tough, the way it had always been tough, and nothing like Hester’s, which broke into a hundred little shards when you put a fork through it.
I tried for three more days, and it came out the same.