The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

On the night before the fair I baked the sixth pie, the best I had. I also baked my huckleberry, because I did not trust myself, and on Thursday morning I put them both in carriers and drove to the fairgrounds. I thought I would decide when I got there.

That is how I came to be standing at table nine, holding up the line.

“Which one, Ivadelle,” Bonnie said.

I looked at the bare white paper where Hester’s pie should have been.

“The chokecherry,” I said.

Bonnie did not say anything. She wrote on her clipboard, slowly, and I knew what she was writing, which was a name she would have to explain to the whole fair board.

Then she took the chokecherry pie out of my hand and set it in my usual spot, and she took the huckleberry carrier from my other hand and did not give it back.

“Well,” she said. “That is going to be talked about.”

“Let it be.”

She put the huckleberry carrier under the table, behind her own chair. “You should know, Ivadelle, that Kaylene calls me every Monday.”

I felt my face go stiff. “Does she.”

“Since June. She asks me whether you’ve signed up. Her mother asks her every week.” Bonnie looked at her clipboard. “Hester can’t say much, mind you. She has maybe a dozen words on a good day. But she can say yours.”

I had to put my hand on the table.

“She won’t be here today,” Bonnie said. “The heat is hard on her. But Kaylene will want to hear how it went, so I would stand up straight when they read the ribbons.”

I said I had a great deal to do, which was a lie. I spent the morning in Bernard’s truck in the fairgrounds lot with the windows down, a seventy-one-year-old woman with no idea what she was doing there.

At ten minutes to one I went in and stood against a post at the back of the Home Arts building, where I could see the plank stage and the door at the same time.

Hester did not come through the door. I had known she wouldn’t. I looked anyway.

By five of one the building was packed to the walls, which is unusual for a canning and baking announcement. Bonnie had let word get around. Walt Prochnow, who has been president of the fair board since before the new roof, sat in the front row with his hat on his knee.

Dorrie Pratt from my bridge club sat two seats down from him. She was the one I had told about the rail fence and the flood.

Gretchen Hoverson, the judge, was a stout woman out of Dillon with a gold tooth and thirty-one years of fairs behind her. She read through the classes the way an auctioneer does. Canned peaches. Dilly beans. Bread and butter pickles. The jams. The cakes.

“And now the fruit pie, double crust,” she said, and the room got still.