“Velma, you were not supposed to see that until Christmas,” Darla repeated, and she took a step toward me in her gold pantsuit with her hand held out for the cabinet door. She was a handsome woman of sixty, with frosted hair and a lanyard from a law office still around her neck, though it was Thanksgiving. “I can explain. I work at Hartwell and Poe. I typed up the inventory of Royce myself, three years ago. It is public record, in a way.” I looked at her pleasant face. It was not public record. A number to the penny, one only my lawyer and I had known, did not float in the air for strangers to catch.
I reached up and peeled the printout off the inside of the cabinet door, tape and all, and folded it into the pocket of my apron. “I will keep this, thank you,” I said. Darla opened her mouth. I raised one floury finger, and she closed it. Down the hall, in the dining room, twenty people were laughing over a story about a golf cart, and four Kroger pies sat on a silver tray under the chandelier. I wiped my hands on my apron and said, “Now I think I would like to speak to my daughter.”
Shannon was in the pantry, hunting for a bag of rolls. She turned when I came in with Darla behind me, and she saw the face of her mother in law, and she saw my face, and her own face emptied. I unfolded the paper and laid it on the shelf between the canned pumpkin and the flour. Dates. Fairview assisted living in December. House sale in January. Power of attorney, Shannon signs, Kyle files. And at the bottom, circled twice in red pen, the number that Royce had left me. “Mama, I never saw that,” my daughter whispered. “I swear to God. I never saw that.”
A basket of homemade pies carried into a garage gave one mother the afternoon to bring her daughter back to the table in Bowling Green.
I believed her, because I know my daughter lies the way a bird flies, badly. She had gone along with a brochure or two, she admitted, standing in her pantry with her hand over her mouth. Kyle had said Fairview was only to have in case, and that I might like the bingo. She had signed a paper once at the table of Darla, something about my medical care, without reading it. Her eyes flooded. “Mama, I did not look. I did not want to look. I thought if I did not look, none of it was happening.” I stroked her hair, a woman of forty seven, and said that I knew, and that she had to look now.
Darla made her move then. She snatched the paper from the shelf, and she bolted for the back door with it clenched in her fist, toward the fire pit on the patio, where I suppose she meant to burn it. But I have kneaded dough for fifty years, and my hands do not give. I caught her by the wrist as she passed, and I held on, with a grip like a vise, while the paper crumpled between us. She yanked. I did not let go. “Darla, you are going to open your hand,” I said. “Slowly.” She looked into my eyes. Then her fingers opened one by one, and the list fell to the floor.
Kyle came running from the dining room, white faced, with a drumstick in his hand. He stopped in the doorway of the pantry. His mother was rubbing her wrist. My daughter was weeping against the shelves. I picked the list up off the tile and held it out to him. He read it from where he stood. “Mrs. Greer, I did not know about the nursing home date,” he said, hoarsely. “I knew about the power of attorney. Mom said it was safer. I should have said no.” He put down the drumstick on the counter, very carefully, as if it were made of glass. “I am so ashamed.”
Then I did the only thing I could think of. I walked out through the garage in my apron and my church shoes, opened the second refrigerator beside the case of Bud Light, and took out my four pies. Bourbon pecan, chess, sweet potato and Dutch apple. I carried them in on the laundry basket, past the astonished faces, and set them on the dining room table beside the Kroger pies, which I moved. “Everyone, I am Velma Greer,” I said. “I baked these. I would like you to taste them.” Nobody moved. Then the father of Kyle, a quiet man named Frank, reached for a plate. By the time he had finished the chess pie, the whole table was clamoring.
The money consequences were quick and fair. My lawyer drew up a note for the ninety thousand dollars, and Shannon and Kyle signed it that same weekend, to repay one thousand dollars a month, with interest, whether I asked for it or not. Darla was reported to the bar association for the misuse of a client file, and resigned from Hartwell and Poe before they could ask. I changed my will, so that every cent would go to a trust that Shannon could not touch alone, and I named my lawyer as the keeper of the power of attorney. I did not do it in anger. I did it as a baker measures flour.
In the name of my husband, Royce, who passed in 2020 and who ate my pies with both hands, I started the Pie Plate Fund. It pays for legal help, estate reviews and counseling for older widows and widowers in Warren, Simpson and Logan counties whose own families have made plans for them without asking. In the first year, we helped forty two people. A woman of eighty, in a pink cardigan, laid a brochure from an assisted living home on the desk and said, “My son says I am going.” I asked her whether she wanted to go. She said no. We started there.
At Christmas, Shannon called me three days early and asked, in a small voice, whether I would bake. I came with six pies in the laundry basket. She met me at the door and took the basket in both hands, and she led me not to the barstool but to the dining room, where a place was set for me at the head of the table with the good china. The Dutch apple with the crumb top went down first. Shannon cut it. She put the first slice on my plate, and she said, with tears running down her face, “Mama, you will always have a seat.” This time I believed her.