Because there were blue ribbons in there. A whole string of them, faded to the color of a winter sky, pinned in a row inside the lid of a wooden recipe box.
I handed it down off the ladder to Lauren, and she and Jake opened it on their new countertop. Every ribbon was from the Putnam County Fair. First Place, Baked Goods. 1981. 1982. 1983. Clear on through 1994. Fourteen years in a row.
Behind the ribbons were the recipe cards. Hundreds of them, in a neat slanted hand. Pies, biscuits, pickled beets, chow chow. And at the very front, standing up by itself in a plastic sleeve, one card with a note clipped to it.
Apple Stack Cake. Opal Hensley. And the note said, For my granddaughter Beth. When you are old enough to win, this is yours. Not a day before.
Jake shook his head. He said the lady who sold them the house told them the old owner could bake, but that was all she said.
I asked around, because that is what you do in a town like Nitro. It took about two phone calls. Everybody over sixty remembered Opal Hensley and her stack cake. They also remembered her sister Faye, who took second place to her every single one of those fourteen years and never did let it go. Folks said Opal hid that recipe from her own sister, and it turned out they were right. She hid it in the ceiling.
Beth was not hard to find either. She runs the cafeteria at an elementary school over in St. Albans. Lauren called her, and Beth drove over that same evening still in her work shoes.
She told us she had been trying to make that cake for thirty years. Every Thanksgiving, she baked one from memory, and every Thanksgiving it came out close but wrong. Her grandmother passed in 1996, before Beth was ever old enough to enter the fair.
Beth picked up that card and turned it over. On the back, in smaller writing, was the one thing she had been missing all those years. She read it, put her hand over her mouth, and started laughing and crying both at the same time.
I will not tell you what it was. That is hers.
Here is what I will tell you. Next August, Beth entered the Putnam County Fair for the first time in her life. She pinned her ribbon inside the lid of that same wooden box, right at the end of the row, and Lauren and Jake got the first two slices.
I got the third. I earned it. I hung them a good hood.
Twenty years hanging hoods. That is the first kitchen I ever worked in where the best thing was up in the ceiling.