Part 3 — Marianne Pie Returns
Artie Sandquist sat at my kitchen table, leaning his cane against the chair, and unfolded a lease from inside his jacket. It was a ten-year commercial lease for the building on Mountain Avenue. On the last page, below the clause about personal guarantees, was a signature that read Gene Brekke. It was not mine.
The signature was close. Someone had practiced it from my loan paperwork. Artie said he had thought nothing of it until the rent went unpaid in August and his bookkeeper pointed out that the guarantor was a seventy-three-year-old man who had never set foot in the restaurant on opening night. So he had come to ask me directly.
I told him the truth. I had guaranteed one loan with the bank, and I had been paying it every month. I had signed nothing else. Artie closed his eyes, nodded slowly, and said, I thought as much. Then he laid a hand on the lease as though it were a sick animal.
Rosalind put the foil-covered pie tin on the table and told the rest. She was the head cook. Trevor had told the kitchen staff that his father wanted nothing to do with the restaurant and was a bitter man who disliked cooking. He had also told them Mariannes recipes were too old-fashioned for his customers. She had made the pie anyway, from her own memory of the county fair.
Marianne never asked to be on the menu, she only wanted her pie to be shared with strangers who needed a slice.
She lifted the foil. The smell of cinnamon and browned butter filled the kitchen. I tasted one bite and had to put down the fork. It was her crust, with the little fork marks at the edge. Rosalind said Marianne had given the recipe to the fair committee years ago, and she had found it in an old church cookbook.
The legal answer was short. In Colorado, a signature made by someone else without authority does not bind the person whose name was used. A handwriting examiner confirmed that the guarantee was not mine. I owed nothing under the lease. The bank loan I had really signed remained mine, and I would keep paying it, but nothing more.
Trevor was the one who had come to the meeting in the end. He stood in the doorway in last nights shirt and told Artie everything. He had forged the guarantee when his credit failed. He agreed to an amended lease, a repayment plan, and an unpaid role in the kitchen under Rosalind until the debt was settled. Paige went home to her mother for a while to think.
Artie made me a proposal. He would reduce the rent by a third if I built a small pie counter in the front window and let Rosalind bake there. I spent a month on the counter, sanding it by hand, with the radio on. When I finished, the oak shone. I put Mariannes blue pitcher at the end of it, full of chokecherry branches.
On the first Saturday, the line went out the door. Trevor served the slices himself, in an apron, and gave every customer a sheet with Mariannes name on it. Jace sat at the counter in his tie and ate three pieces. When I came to pay, Rosalind pushed my money back across the oak and said, Mr. Brekke, you never have to.