Then she walked up to that microphone with the apron folded over her arm, and she held it out to the committee president along with a piece of paper she’d had in her handbag all evening.
She said, “You’ll want both of these, honey. The apron’s just cotton. The other one you can’t do without.”
It was the temporary food service permit.
Every county in this state will tell you the same thing. You cannot sell food to the public at a fundraiser without a permit, and that permit issues to a named person, and that named person has to hold a certified food protection manager card, which is a course and a proctored exam and a fee every five years.
My grandmother has held that certificate since 1999. She took the class in a community college classroom at sixty-one years old, sitting between two restaurant cooks in their twenties, and she has renewed it five times since, and she pays for it herself.
There is no one else on that committee who has it. There never has been. Nobody ever thought about it, because for twenty-five years a permit just appeared on the wall of the pie booth every August like weather.
The fair was eleven days out.
Grandma didn’t say any of that in a mean way. She has never in her life said anything in a mean way. She laid it out plain, the way you’d explain a recipe, and then she said the fair had been good to this town and she hoped it went well, and she picked up her handbag.
My aunt read the rest of it, because somebody had to.
In the pie booth’s recipe box, taped inside the lid, is a card from 1999 in my grandfather’s handwriting. He died that March. The first fair Grandma ever baked for was five months later:
“Ruthie — you said you don’t know what to do with yourself now. Do the pies. Nobody feeds a town by accident, and you were always going to be the one.”
She has baked every August since on the anniversary of the year she lost him and never once told the committee why.
That president called our house four times in nine days. Grandma took the third call.
What she asked for wasn’t an apology, though she got one, in front of the whole fair on opening morning. She asked that they send two younger women to the certification class on the fair’s dime, so that the next time somebody at a microphone decides the baker is scenery, the town doesn’t lose its pie booth over it.
They did. Both passed in July.
She baked anyway. Forty-one pies, starting at four in the morning, with two women beside her learning the crust.
The booth has a sign on it now with my grandfather’s name on it. Grandma fought that for a week and lost, which I believe is the first argument that woman has lost in about forty years.