The Pie War That Saved Our Fair

For twelve years running, Vernon Stroud beat my pie by exactly one point.

Not two. Not five. One. Ninety nine to my ninety eight, year after year, like the judges at the Hickory Flat Community Fair had a rule carved into the underside of the scoring table. I have thought about this more than any grown woman should think about a ribbon. I have lain awake replaying the flake of my crust. I have stood in my own kitchen at eleven at night, pressing a fork into a cooled pie shell, muttering to a room with nobody in it, “what does he know about nutmeg that I don’t.”

So when I tell you that Vernon Stroud and I ended up standing shoulder to shoulder at a card table at the Hickory Flat fairgrounds, aprons dusted in the same flour, laughing so hard I had to sit down on an overturned bucket, you have to understand what a strange road that was. It started, like most trouble in this town starts, at a fair board meeting in the Grange hall, under lights that hum, with folding chairs that fold wrong.

I go to those meetings because somebody from the Baptist church always has to, and this year that somebody was me. Vernon goes because he has sat on the fair board since Nixon was president and outlasted three fair board presidents by sheer refusal to die or move to Springfield. We sit on opposite sides of the room out of long habit, the way divorced people sit on opposite sides of a courtroom, except we were never married, we were just entered in the same pie category since 1978 and it has calcified into something like a marriage anyway.