You look just like her, the judge said softly. Like who. Like Evelyn Parks, she said. Your grandmother. I came in second to her pie for eleven years.
She stood up, the head judge of the state fair, silver haired and sharp eyed, and she turned to Stacy at her station in her borrowed apron, and she said the thing that ended the whole charade.
My grandmother won the blue ribbon for apple pie at the Wayne County Fair eleven years running, from 1961 to 1971, and the woman judging the state finals had spent those eleven years coming in second to her, and she knew that pie by heart.
Stacy, my sister in law, had asked me for the recipe and I had said no, Grandma made me promise. So she took my leftover pie home one Sunday, reverse engineered what she could, and entered it at the county fair under her own name, and won, because it was my grandmothers pie and my grandmothers pie wins.
What she had not counted on was the state finals requiring her to bake it live, from scratch, in front of six judges, which is how I got a phone call at seven in the morning from a sobbing Stacy begging for the secret ingredient, the one thing nobody would ever guess, the one thing I have never written down.
I drove two hours to the fairgrounds. Stacy thought I was coming to save her. I walked right past her station, up to the head judge, and I did not have to say a word, because she took one look at my face and said a name I had not expected to hear from a stranger. Evelyn Parks.
I came in second to your grandmother for eleven years, the judge told me, and I would know that lattice and that crimp and that cinnamon anywhere. And then she turned to Stacy and said the thing.
Young lady, she said, I have judged this fair for thirty years, and I have never once disqualified a baker in front of a crowd, because I believe in letting people keep their dignity. But you entered another womans pie under your own name, and then you called that woman at seven in the morning to ask her for the secret so you could keep the lie going on my table. That is not a baker. That is a thief with an oven. You are disqualified.
Stacy took off the apron. There was nothing to say. You cannot bake a pie you do not know live in front of six judges, and you cannot buy the ending of a story you stole the beginning of.
My husband Tom had told me it was just a pie, let her have this one, she never wins anything. It was not just a pie. It was my grandmother, standing on a stool in her kitchen teaching a nine year old the one thing nobody would ever guess, and making me promise never to write it down.
The judge asked me if I would bake it. Right there, that day, in the empty station Stacy left behind. So I did. From scratch, from memory, with the ingredient I will take to my own grave the way my grandmother took it to hers. It did not win the state fair, it was not entered in time, and the rules are the rules even for Evelyn Parkss granddaughter. But the head judge tasted it, and she closed her eyes, and she was twenty five again, coming in second and not minding, and that was a better ribbon than blue.
Tom and I are working on things, slowly. The recipe stays with me. It will go to my own daughter, on a stool, in my kitchen, with the same promise my grandmother asked of me. Never write it down. Never let anyone take it. I did not. In the end, I did not.