Miss Ada across the way baked the best apple pie in the county for forty years, and she must have given away a thousand of them, to funerals, to new mothers, to anybody having a hard week, just because it made her happy. That woman fed half this street here in Terre Haute out of pure kindness. But this spring, the pies stopped. The curtains stayed drawn. Her grown son Keithly moved in to look after Mama, and now when I knock to check on her, he opens the door just a crack, says Mama is resting, and shuts it in my face before I can get a word in.
I started baking her my own pie, just to have a reason to come by and maybe coax her out for a minute of talk. Brought one every week. And every week Keithly took it at the door, said he would give it to her, and that was that. I never once got past him to see her. And that is not right. Miss Ada loved company more than anybody I ever knew. A woman who spent forty years knocking on doors does not just stop answering her own. Something had that sweet old woman shut up in her own house, and it wore a face I recognized.
Then one day Keithly pulled out in that pickup of his and was gone, and I hurried across the yard and tapped on her side window. Miss Ada edged the curtain back, saw it was me, and instead of hello she whispered, barely moving her lips, help me, he takes my money and he will not let me leave and I am so afraid of him.
Keithly had come back to look after Mama the way a fox looks after a henhouse. He had her pension, her bank card, her car keys. He kept her behind drawn curtains, cut off from every friend, told her nobody wanted to see her anymore, and helped himself to everything she had while a whole street of people who loved her stood on the wrong side of a door.
I did not go home and wonder about it. I called the police, and I called the county adult protective folks, and I called Miss Ada daughter down in Evansville, who had been frantic because her mother suddenly would not answer the phone and her brother would not let her visit.
They came fast. Keithly had done enough that he is answering for it now. Her daughter moved her mama in with her for a spell to set everything right, the accounts, the locks, the fear.
I baked this whole street pies for forty years. When it was my turn to need somebody, you were the one who would not stop knocking. God bless a persistent neighbor.
That is what Miss Ada told me, on her own porch, in the daylight, curtains thrown wide open.
The pies are back. She is at her daughter place in Evansville now, safe and free, and last week a box came in the mail with my name on it. An apple pie, the best in the county, and a note that just said, first of the next thousand. I have never eaten anything so good in my life.