The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

“This is the 2011 blue,” I said. “I’d like Bonnie to take it, and I’d like it to go to the woman it belonged to.”

“Ivadelle,” Walt Prochnow said gently, from the front row. He stood up with his hat held against his belt. “By the book, that ribbon is yours. The board can’t go back and rejudge a pie nobody judged.”

“Then the book is wrong,” I said. “Or I am. Maybe both. Bonnie, would you bring the fair book?”

Bonnie didn’t ask why. She fetched it from the entry table, the big green ledger with every winner back to 1948 in a dozen different hands, and opened it flat on the edge of the stage. She found the page and put her finger on the line.

I took the pencil from her clipboard.

I had to do it in front of everyone, so I did. I drew one line through my name beside 2011. Beside it, small, I wrote the words Hester Vold, fruit pie, not judged, clerk’s error. Then I signed under it, so nobody could ever say who had made the error.

Bonnie put her hand flat over mine on the page and left it there for a moment. She has run that building for twenty-two years and is not a woman who touches people. Her hand was warm and dry and shook a little.

“That’s going to be talked about,” she said, very low.

“Let it be.”

Then I took this year’s blue ribbon, the one I had just been handed, and walked down the nine steps to table nine. I did not look at anybody. I counted every step.

The little brass pin was still in my pocket from the morning. I pinned the ribbon to the white butcher paper on the left side of my usual spot, the bare square where Hester’s pie had sat every August of my life, and I smoothed it flat with my thumb.

“Leave it there through Sunday, if you would,” I said to Bonnie, who had followed me down. “Then take both of them out to Kaylene’s.”

“I will.”

“Don’t tell her anything. Just give them to her.”

“I’ll tell her what you said up there,” Bonnie said. “She’ll want it from somebody who heard it.”

That was the whole of what I did, and it cost me what it cost me. The tally on my pantry door went from fourteen to thirteen, and every woman at bridge club had the news by suppertime.

I will not pretend I enjoyed the walk to the parking lot. People looked at me differently. A few of them looked away. Dorrie Pratt caught my sleeve at the door and said, “I said worse than that about her crust, Ivadelle,” and let go before I could answer.

I ate my huckleberry pie at two in the afternoon on the tailgate of Bernard’s truck, with Bonnie beside me and two forks between us. She had brought the carrier out from under her chair without being asked.