Chapter 9
MARLA
Wanda called me on a Tuesday and didn't bother with hello.
"The Bardwell girl broke her ankle."
"I'm sorry?"
"Kimmy Bardwell. She runs the pie booth at the festival, she's run it since her mother died, and she went off a step ladder putting up Halloween lights on the second of October, Marla, who does that.
" Papers rustled on her end. "So the booth's got no head and the festival's Saturday, and I told Deb Lutz I knew somebody. "
"Wanda."
"I told her I knew somebody who ran a phone bank at sixteen years old for nineteen hours."
"I live two hours away."
"I have a guest room," Wanda said, "that is made up."
I got there Friday night at nine and slept in that bed under the quilt I helped tie in 1998. Twenty minutes lying in the dark listening to a house that wasn't mine, and then I went out like a light and slept nine hours, which I have not done since the Obama administration.
By six-forty Saturday morning we were at the fairgrounds pavilion.
The pie booth is not a card table. It's a twenty-foot open-front shed with a corrugated roof, and by seven that morning there were four hundred and sixty pies in it, sitting on shelving a man named Gully builds fresh every year out of sawhorses and plywood.
Every one of them made in somebody's kitchen and carried in with a name on the box lid.
They sell by the slice and by the whole pie, and the money's gone to the volunteer fire department since 1961.
It was chaos. Two women arguing about whether the sugar-free ones ought to be up front. Nobody could find the cash box. There was no system at all for the boxes coming in, so people were setting them down wherever there was room, and by seven-fifteen there were forty pies on the ground.
I stood there about ninety seconds with my hands on my hips.
Then I heard myself say, "Okay, everybody stop."
They stopped.
Fifteen women, two teenagers, a man with a hand truck — all of them turned around and looked at me. Nobody said who's this, because they knew exactly who I was, and about four of them said my name at the same time.
I put Sharon Gebhardt on intake with a clipboard, because Sharon has beautiful handwriting and no patience, which is the exact right combination.
Teenagers on hauling. Deb Lutz on the cash box, because she's run the church bazaar nine years and could do it in her sleep, and she'd been trying to help everywhere at once instead.
I sent a boy out to his mother's car for a folding table and set it crosswise at the front so nobody could wander in through the open end.
Fruit on the left, cream on the right, sugar-free in the middle at eye level, where a person with diabetes doesn't have to hunt for it in public.
Twenty minutes, and that shed ran like a machine. Gully came by at seven-forty, took a look at the traffic pattern I'd built out of one folding table, said, "Huh," and went off to get more sawhorses.
By eight I had a boy named Tyler running empties out to a truck.
By eight-fifteen I had his little brother posted at the tape telling people the line started there, which he did with both arms out like a crossing guard.
Nobody ever argued with him. His mother came by at nine and took a picture of him doing it.
At eight Donna Reesor came under the rope with a box in her arms and stopped dead.
"Marla Hutchins is running the pie booth," she hollered, to nobody, to the whole fairgrounds.
"Marla Bunch is running the pie booth," I said. "Thirty-one years, Donna."
"Oh, honey, we know." She kissed my cheek and handed me a coconut cream.
At eight-thirty some woman I didn't know brought in a peach crumb in a foil pan with nothing written on the lid. Sharon said, "That's Louise's, she never labels," and wrote LOUISE on it in marker without looking up.
By nine the line was forty deep. Somebody's grandbaby got separated from her mother and wound up sitting on an overturned crate behind the register with a slice of cherry while three women worked their phones.
Eleven minutes to find that mother. Somebody says a name, somebody else says I've got her sister's number, somebody else says she's over at the tractor pull, and the whole thing just moves.
Nobody had to start it. It went the way the fellowship hall went in April of '89, except this time it was a four-year-old with cherry pie on her chin.
Nadine Cropsey brought me a lemonade at ten and told me about her father's hip, which had gotten worse, and the surgery they wouldn't do on account of his heart.
"They said his heart won't take the anesthesia. So he's just—" She made a small helpless motion with the cup. "He's in the chair now. He was on a ladder in June."
"Is somebody with him during the day?"
"My sister comes at noon. Mornings are the trouble."
I got a pen out of the cash box, wrote my number on the back of a raffle ticket, and put it in her hand.
"That's not a call me sometime," I said. "That's a call me at seven in the morning when nobody's coming and you can't get him to the bathroom by yourself."
"Marla, you live two hours away."
"I know how to work a phone. There are eleven people on this fairground who live four minutes from your daddy's house, and I can have three of them lined up before you finish that lemonade."
Nadine looked down at the raffle ticket a second.
"You tell him a kid with a notebook says hello," I said.
Her eyes went bright. She squeezed my arm hard enough to leave a mark and went off to sell raffle tickets with her chin up.
At eleven Deb Lutz came in under the rope and stood at my elbow watching Sharon run intake for about thirty seconds.
"How'd you know to put her there?"
"She's got beautiful handwriting and no patience."
Deb laughed at that. Then she said, "You ought to be doing this every year," and moved on before I could answer. She'd set it down next to me like a box of pie. I could pick it up or leave it lay.
At noon Wanda and I got twenty minutes on the tailgate of Bo's truck with paper plates on our knees.
"You're happy," she said.
"My feet hurt."
"You're happy. You've got that face on you haven't had since—" She thought about it and decided not to finish, which for Wanda is practically restraint.
I ate about half a pork sandwich and set it down.
"Wanda, I've got to say something, and I need you to let me say it wrong."
"Uh oh."
"Keith came out to your house."
"He did."
"He told you it was him. The starving." I put the plate on the truck bed. "And it was. He'll be paying that awhile. But there's a piece of it he can't pay, and I've been letting him carry that too because it was easier on me, and I'm done doing that."
Wanda got very quiet.
"I could have come alone," I said. "The whole time.
Any Sunday of my life. Nobody in that house ever stopped me — he never once said don't go, Wanda, not one time in thirty-one years, and I want you to hear me say that out loud.
" My voice was doing something I couldn't get hold of.
"And I did come alone. Ninety-six, ninety-seven, I was out here every month with a baby on my hip. Then I stopped."
"Why?"
"Because coming alone started to feel like an accusation.
" Two hundred yards off, the tractor pull started another heat.
"Every time I got in that car by myself it said something about my marriage that I wasn't ready to say out loud at my own kitchen table.
So I quit getting in the car. It was easier to lose you slow than to look at him and ask a question I already knew the answer to. "
Wanda looked out at the field.
"I starved you to keep the peace at my own table," I said. "That part's mine. It isn't his, and I'm not handing it to him."
She was quiet a long time. A kid went past us with a balloon.
"Okay," she said finally.
"Okay?"
"What do you want, an argument?" She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, quick, mad about having to. "Yeah. That's about how it looked from over here. I've had six years to figure out you weren't coming and no idea on this earth what I'd done."
"You didn't do anything."
"I know that now." She laughed, wet. "Took a man driving up my driveway in a work truck."
We sat there a minute.
"First Sunday of every month," I said.
She turned her head.
"Not we should. Not let's find a weekend. First Sunday. Yours, mine, alternating, I don't care. It goes in ink." I was already reaching for my phone. "And if I'm sick or somebody's dying we move it to the second Sunday, and we move it that same week, on the phone, not in a text."
"Marla."
"Say yes or say no. Don't be nice to me about it."
"Yes, you lunatic," Wanda said. "Obviously yes."
We did it that afternoon at her kitchen table, pie money counted, my hands still smelling like cardboard.
She got the wall calendar down off its nail, the free one from the insurance office, and I got my phone.
We put in November first, December sixth, January third, February seventh, all the way out through next September.
She wrote MARLA in every square in capital letters with a pen that skipped.
Had to go over November twice, and when the pen quit she licked the tip, the way her mother always did.
Around four, back at the fairgrounds, they started tearing the booth down.
I was on a folding chair with the cash bag and a legal pad, doing the count for the fire department.
Eleven hundred and forty dollars, which is a record for that booth, and Deb Lutz screamed out loud when I told her the number.
I looked up because Donna had said something to somebody down at the end of the pavilion.
Keith was standing at the edge of the concrete.
Clean shirt. Road on him, that gray look he gets after three hours behind the wheel.
He wasn't waving, just standing there with his hands at his sides about thirty feet off, watching me sit in a folding chair in a pavilion in Chilton with a cash bag on my knees and four women waiting on me to tell them what came next.
I'd known where he'd been since Ruthann called. He'd texted me at eleven that morning, which I read standing in a shed full of pie: Going to Verl's again today. Back east by 4. I'd like to come by the fairgrounds if that's all right.
I hadn't answered it. I'd had a line forty deep.
We looked at each other across that concrete a couple of seconds.
Then Wanda came out of the shed with a stack of empty boxes up to her chin and hollered without breaking stride, "Well, don't just stand there, whoever you are — grab the other end of this."
And he came in.
He didn't come to me first. He put his hands out and took half the stack.
Wanda pointed with her elbow, and the two of them hauled boxes to the dumpster at the far end of the lot.
Then he came back and did it again. Then the sawhorses.
Then he asked Gully where the plywood went, and Gully told him, at length, twice.
I sat there with the cash bag and the legal pad and watched my husband work in my town under my best friend's direction for an hour and ten minutes.
At one point Deb Lutz came over and said, "Who's that?"
I opened my mouth, and that's my husband was right there, loaded.
"That's Keith," I said. "He's mine."
Deb watched him load sawhorses a second.
"Well. He stacks it right," she said.
He never once came over to be seen doing it.