My husband’s sister held up a blue ribbon for his late grandmother’s sour cherry pie, the pie I baked at five that morning, and when the clapping stopped she leaned in and said, “Smile for the paper, Hannah. You’re not family yet.” The card pinned beside it was in my handwriting, and she had no idea why.
Eleven weeks married, and that pie was the one thing I’d ever done for my husband’s family that they could see.
His grandmother asked me to enter it.
Back in March, from the hospital bed in her front room, Arlene said, “Somebody’s taking my cherry pie to the Brenner County Fair in August, and it isn’t going to be me.”
She’d won with it three times. 1981, 1994, 2006.
The ribbons hung on thumbtacks inside her pantry door until the house sold in June.
Natasha took those ribbons.
She took the quilt and the good roasting pan too.
I didn’t fight her on any of it.
All I’d kept was one index card.
So I baked the pie at five that morning, alone in our apartment kitchen, with the card propped against the flour canister.
I got the lattice wrong twice.
Trey drove. I held the pie on my lap for forty minutes with both hands.
Natasha was waiting outside the exhibit barn with her sunglasses pushed up on her head.
“Give it here,” she said. “The parking line’s all the way back to the road. I’ll check it in while you two find a spot.”
I said thanks. I meant it.
When we finally walked in, the little folded tent card in front of the pie said NATASHA HUBBARD.
Her name. In her big round print.
Trey read it. Then he looked at me, and then up at the ceiling fans.
“It’s the same family,” he said. “Does it matter whose name’s on the tent?”
A man behind us was eating a corn dog with a fork.
I didn’t know how to tell my husband, in front of the corn dog line, that it mattered.
His mother came over with two lemonades and handed one to Natasha.
“Oh, Hannah, don’t,” Rochelle said. “Natasha grew up on that pie. You’ve had it, what, twice?”
Four times.
I’d had it FOUR times. Every Sunday in March, cut thin, eaten off a paper towel next to that bed.
The judging took most of an hour.
The judge was Morton Bosman.
He’d been reading Arlene’s entry cards at that fair for forty years, and he’d sat two pews behind her at church for most of them.
He tasted ours last.
Then he put his fork down, picked up the card, and held it a long time.
Longer than the pie.
He called the number. Natasha went up.
She held the ribbon over her head with both hands like she’d pulled something off a dock.
People clapped. Rochelle cried a little.
Then Natasha came back to the table, bent down to me, and said it.
Smile for the paper. Not family yet.
A girl from the county paper was right behind her with a notebook.
“Is that her original card?” the girl said.
“It’s Grandma’s card, in her own hand,” Natasha said. “It’s the last thing she ever wrote.”
I put my palm flat on the tablecloth.
Arlene hadn’t held a pen since January.
“That’s not true,” I said to Trey, low.
“Hannah,” he said. “Not today.”
The girl wrote it down. The LAST thing she ever wrote.
I’d kept that card in a sandwich bag for four months.
The hospice nurse handed it to me in that bag the morning after, with Arlene’s reading glasses folded on top.
I never told anyone why it came to me.
Nobody in that family ever asked.
After the photo, I caught Natasha at the gate to the gravel lot.
“I need the card back,” I said.
She laughed. “Back?”
“It’s mine. She gave it to me.”
“You sat with her six weeks,” Natasha said. “I had her thirty-seven years. You don’t get to walk in at the end and walk out with her things.”
“I’m not asking for her things. I’m asking for the card.”
“She was so doped up she called the mailman Daddy,” she said. “She’d have given you the toaster.”
Trey had his keys out.
He was looking at them like they came with instructions.
“Girls,” Rochelle said.
Two teenagers were backing a heifer into a trailer ten feet away. They both turned around when Natasha’s voice went up.
“SHE WAS MY GRANDMOTHER, NOT YOURS,” she said. “You married my brother in June and you think one pie makes you a Hubbard.”
The heifer kicked the trailer ramp.
Nobody else moved.
That’s when Morton Bosman came across the gravel with his clipboard under his arm.
“Natasha,” he said. “Fair tradition. The blue ribbon reads the back of her card at the awards tent at four. Arlene did it every time she won.”
Natasha said, “There’s a back?”
“There’s a note on it,” Morton said. “Same hand as the front.”
He wasn’t looking at Natasha when he said it.
He was looking at me.
At four o’clock she stood at the microphone with the card pinched between two long pink nails.
Rochelle sat in the front row. Trey stood by a tent pole with his keys still in his hand.
Only two people alive had ever read the back of that card.
Me, and the man holding the clipboard.
Natasha turned it over.
She read the first four words into the microphone.
Then she stopped, and looked for me in the crowd.
The awards tent
“Hannah held the pen,” she said.
That was all she read.
The speaker on the tent pole ran half a second behind her, so the whole tent heard it twice.
Her eyes kept going down the card. Then she found me in the third row of folding chairs, next to a woman with a stroller.
Somebody near the back said, “Who’s Hannah?”
Morton stood at the side of the stage with his clipboard against his chest. “Go on, Natasha,” he said. “That’s not the whole note.”
“It’s family business,” she said.
She folded the card in half, the wrong way, so the crease went straight through the recipe, and pushed it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she held the ribbon up again, like the first time had been practice.
“Grandma would’ve loved this,” she said. “Thank you, everybody.”
People clapped, because that’s what you do. The girl from the paper underlined something.
I took the sandwich bag out of my purse. Arlene’s glasses were folded inside with nothing under them. I’d brought it to carry the card home in.
Trey looked at the bag, and then at his keys.
Natasha came down the plywood steps and up my row, and she bent to me the same way she had in the barn.
“What else did you make her say?” she said.
Kittle Road
Arlene called my cell herself, the first week of March. I didn’t know she had the number. I’d met her maybe four times, always at Rochelle’s, always holding a plate.
“Come Sunday,” she said. “Don’t bring Trey. Don’t tell his mother.”
I told Trey I was going to my mom’s.
The hospital bed sat where her couch used to be, turned so she could see the mailbox. She didn’t say hello. She lifted both hands off the blanket.
The fingers had curled in toward the palms, like she was holding a ball nobody else could see.
“January,” she said. “Can’t work a fork worth anything. Can’t work a pen at all. And I’m not having my own kids sit here and watch me try.”
“So why me?”
“You’re not family yet,” she said. “You don’t have anything to remember me different from.”
Then she sent me into her kitchen.
That’s how the six Sundays went. I baked and she hollered through the doorway. Too much water. Drain the cherries, don’t squeeze them. Over, under, over, and a sigh from the bed when I got it wrong.
“Half a teaspoon of the almond,” she said. “That’s the part nobody’s ever figured out.”
I asked once where everybody was.
“They don’t come much,” she said. “They’re busy people.”
The last Sunday she had me get an index card from the drawer by the phone, and she told me the recipe line by line. When we got to the almond she said, “Just write almond. Not how much. You’ll remember.”
She put her glasses on and read it back with one finger hanging over each line.
“Turn it over,” she said.
She told me the back, and I wrote it. Then she wanted to sign, so I put the pen in her fist and closed her fingers around it with mine. She dragged out a mark at the bottom like a fishhook.
“That’ll have to be me,” she said. “And nobody hears about my hands. You promise.”
I promised. She kept the card on her tray table after that, and nine days later she was gone.
Now Natasha stood over my chair, waiting, and I had nothing I was allowed to say.
The corner of the card stuck up out of her back pocket.
Beth
The girl from the paper caught us outside the tent by the lemonade trailer. Her lanyard said BETH and BRENNER COUNTY LEDGER.
“Sorry,” she said. “The note said Hannah held the pen? Is the card not the grandmother’s handwriting? I just want it right.”
“My brother’s wife copied it out after the funeral,” Natasha said. “She’s been after Grandma’s things since April.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said.
Rochelle put her hand on my arm. Her rings were cold from the lemonade. “Hannah, honey. Not in the paper. For Trey.”
Trey had come up behind her. He didn’t say anything for Trey.
So I said the part I could say. “I wrote that card in March. Arlene told me every word. She was right there.”
Beth wrote. Then she looked up. “Why would she need you to write it?”
I could feel the hinge of the glasses through the plastic bag.
“She asked me to,” I said.
“Okay. Is there anything in her own handwriting? A birthday card, anything? Just to compare.”
There hadn’t been anything since January.
“No,” I said.
Beth wrote that down too.
“And she’s not a daughter-in-law,” Natasha said, leaning over the notebook. “Put granddaughter-in-law. Barely.”
Rochelle laughed once and then looked sorry about it.
Natasha didn’t know what I was keeping. She could see I’d keep it, though.
“Go ahead, Hannah,” she said. “Tell her why.”
Number 41
By five the pies were coming off the tables. Morton sat at the end of the barn with a green ledger open, the kind with a red cloth spine, and a box of foil pans at his feet.
He waved me over with two fingers.
“Arlene’s pie had almond in it,” he said. “So did yours.”
“Half a teaspoon,” I said.
He nodded like I’d passed something, and turned the ledger around.
Every entry at the Brenner County Fair goes in that book, in pen, written by whoever checks it in. He flipped back. 1981, Arlene Hubbard, sour cherry, first. 1994, first. 2006, first.
2007, no Arlene.
N. Hubbard. Sour cherry. No place.
2008, N. Hubbard, no place. 2009. 2010. He kept turning pages and I kept reading the same line. Nineteen years of it, right up to last August.
“She was eighteen the first time,” Morton said. “Arlene quit entering that same summer.”
He turned to today.
Entry 41. Sour cherry. N. Hubbard. Checked in 7:40 a.m., big round print.
A line through it. Withdrawn 9:12. Initialed NH.
Entry 52. Sour cherry. N. Hubbard. 9:15.
At 9:15 I’d been sitting in the parking line with cherry juice on the heel of my hand.
“So hers was here first,” I said. “And she pulled it.”
He tapped the rules taped inside the cover. Exhibitor must be the baker of record.
“Somebody puts that in writing, I take the ribbon back and it goes to the baker,” he said. “That’s you.”
“Will you write it?”
“I’ve sat two pews behind that family for forty years,” he said. “I’ll pull a ribbon. I won’t write the letter.”
He ran his finger back down the nineteen lines. Next to every one, in his small slanted hand, he’d written the same two words.
No almond.
Rochelle’s tailgate
Natasha was in the gravel lot on the open tailgate of her mother’s SUV. A pie carrier sat beside her with the lid off. Entry 41, after nine hours in a hot car.
The lattice was perfect. Every strip the same width.
She had the card open on her knee. She didn’t look up.
“‘My hands quit in January,'” she read, “‘and I won’t have my own kids watch me fight a pencil, so don’t any of you be sore at her. It’s the ’81 pie. The almond is the part none of you ever got. Morton, the ribbon goes to whoever baked it.'”
She turned the card toward me with her thumb beside the fishhook.
“That’s her? That little thing?”
“I held her hand around the pen,” I said.
She put the card face down. Then she took out her phone, scrolled a while, and put it on speaker.
“Tasha, honey, don’t drive out Sunday. I’ve got that bug again. You bake something and bring it to me when I’m fit to look at.”
I knew the voice from the kitchen doorway.
Natasha scrolled. There was another one under it, and another.
“Eleven of those,” she said. “January to April. Mom got shingles. Trey got the flu. I baked a pie every Sunday and put it in my freezer like she was going to call.”
They don’t come much. They’re busy people.
“I found out about you at the funeral home,” she said. “The nurse thanked you for your Sundays right in front of me. I thought she had you mixed up with somebody.”
She looked at the lattice on her own pie, then at me.
“Was she still mean about the lattice?” she said.
Entry 52
“Every Sunday,” I said. “Over, under, over. She sighed when I got it wrong.”
Natasha almost smiled. Then Rochelle and Trey came across the gravel with Beth behind them, and it went away.
“Beth needs a quote about the note,” Rochelle said.
Natasha got off the tailgate with the card. “Sure. Grandma dictated it while she was sick, it’s her recipe, and it’s the last thing she…”
“Forty-one,” I said.
She stopped.
“Your entry. Seven-forty this morning. Withdrawn at nine-twelve. It’s in Morton’s book.”
Rochelle looked at the pie carrier for a long time. “Tasha. Is that yours?”
“So what, Mom?” Natasha said. “I’ve carried that pie up those steps since I was eighteen. Nineteen years of no place, and Morton looking at me like I forgot my homework. So this morning I put the one that was going to win on the table. That’s it. She’d have wanted a Hubbard up there, and I’m the only Hubbard who ever even tried.”
“She told me shingles,” Rochelle said.
“She told everybody something,” Natasha said. “She told Hannah we never came. Didn’t she? Didn’t she tell you that?”
I didn’t answer.
“And now you’ll march in there and file, and take a ribbon off her granddaughter in front of the whole county, over a pie she let you make because you didn’t COUNT.”
“She baked it,” Trey said.
His keys were in his pocket.
“Trey.”
“She baked it at five. She held it on her lap for forty minutes. I drove.” He looked at his sister. “I was there, Tash.”
Beth wrote that down.
“Keep the ribbon,” I said.
Natasha’s mouth opened and nothing came out.
“Put it on your mom’s pantry door with the other three. I won’t file anything.” I held the sandwich bag open. “I want the card. And tell Beth whose hand it’s in.”
That was Arlene’s fourth blue ribbon, and my name would never be anywhere near it.
“And what do I call it?” Natasha said. “I already told her it was the last thing she wrote.”
“The mark at the bottom is hers,” I said. “That’s the last thing she wrote.”
Natasha looked at the fishhook. Then she turned to Beth.
“Grandma dictated it to my brother’s wife in March,” she said. “Her hands were bad. The writing’s Hannah’s. The mark is Grandma.”
She held the card over the open bag and didn’t let go.
“How much almond?” she said.
It was the last thing from that kitchen that was only mine.
“Half a teaspoon,” I said.
She dropped the card in on top of the glasses. Then she took Beth’s pen and wrote 1/2 ALMOND on her wrist.
Rochelle’s pantry door
The second Sunday in October, Rochelle had the four ribbons up on thumbtacks inside her pantry door. Natasha brought Arlene’s three over the week after the fair.
The Ledger clipping was on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a pear. Natasha with the ribbon over her head. Me at the edge of it, smiling for the paper. They spelled Hubbard with one b.
Trey was eating cold ham out of the package with his fingers.
The card stayed in its bag in my purse, on the chair by the door, with the glasses folded on top.
Natasha had the dough rolled out on the counter and a bottle of almond extract open next to it. She’d cut the strips. Then she stood there with flour on her wrist and didn’t start.
She pushed the strips across the counter to me.
“You do the lattice,” she said. “I’ll watch.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still keeps a recipe card in someone else’s handwriting.
For more family betrayals and the secrets they leave behind, read “I Wore That Ring For Twenty Minutes At The Courthouse, Then Put It In A Sock” and “My Brother Cancelled My Cardiology Appointment From My Own Phone”. And when family crosses one boundary too many, there’s “My Son Held Up My Spare Key And Told Me My Sister Says Hi”.
