Families packed the fellowship hall as I walked through the side doors, and I stopped about four steps in, because every table had a pie on it and I had not baked a single one of them.
Twenty-two tables. Twenty-two pies. And propped against every one, a folded index card.
Apple, lattice top, table four: Megan Duvall, 2011. That’s the year Megan’s mother died and she came to my kitchen on a Tuesday because she wanted to learn to make her mother’s crust and had nobody left to ask.
Cherry, table nine: Anita Cruz, 2016. Anita had been in this country five months and could not talk to anybody in that kitchen and we got through a whole afternoon on hand signals and a bag of flour.
Pecan, table one: Denise Howard. My own daughter-in-law, 2019, the winter she was pregnant and couldn’t sleep and turned up at my back door at nine at night because she wanted to know how much shortening.
She wrote her own card. She’s the one who did the whole thing.
She’d started it about a week after she said that in the kitchen. She told me later she got in her car and sat in the church parking lot and could not make herself turn the key, because it had come out of her mouth as a joke and landed as something else entirely, and she knew it in about two seconds and said nothing.
So she went and found the kitchen ledger.
Every church has one. Ours goes back to 1961 and it is nothing but who signed up to bring what. She read twenty-two years of it and made a list of every woman I’d ever had in that kitchen with me, and she called every last one of them.
Fourteen said yes right away. The rest said yes after they’d been talked into it.
In the front of that ledger, on the inside cover, there’s a line in pencil from before my time. Corliss Beaty wrote it, who taught me in 1979, and who I have not thought about carefully in years:
“Whoever gets this book next: bake the extra one. There is always somebody who came in late and thinks the last piece wasn’t meant for her.”
Denise had that page photocopied and framed and hung it in the church kitchen by the ovens where the sign-up sheet goes.
Then she stood up in front of that hall and read the names off the cards, all twenty-two, and said each woman had learned it in the same kitchen from the same person, and then she asked me to come up and I would not, and she came and got me.
My son says she practiced it in the car for three weeks.
We bake together on the Friday before now, the whole crowd of them, six ovens going, and the noise in there is unholy.
Nobody remembers who baked the pies. Turns out twenty-two people did.