This year, the Fall Supper sold out by Wednesday. That had never happened before. Usually we sell out by the time the rolls come around, mostly to people who smelled the rolls.
By six on Saturday, the Grange Hall held three hundred and ten people at long tables with paper tablecloths. The WELCOME NEIGHBORS banner was back up, a little lopsided, with a faint cream-colored mark in the middle that nobody could get out. Arlo had begged me to leave it. He said it had "history now."
There were three cameras. There were lights on stands. There was a woman from the network whose only job seemed to be holding a second, smaller tablet for Delphine.
And there was Gerald, sitting at the end of table nine in his cardigan. Nobody had invited him. Nobody had the heart to move him.
Supper went the way supper always goes. Roast chicken, green beans, rolls, and Nico's pies for dessert, the eating kind. Cil gave the financial report in four minutes and converted every number into meals. People clapped for the meals.
Barrett wasn't at dinner. Arlo reported that he was in the Grange kitchen, pacing between the sinks. He was saying something under his breath that sounded like counting.
"To three?" I asked.
"To forty-one," said Arlo. "Then he starts over."
Hattie sat in the front row, as she has for sixteen years. She had a white envelope on the table in front of her. I knew without looking that there was a twenty-dollar bill inside, and a card that said Good wishes.
She caught my eye. She pointed at the envelope, then at herself, then at the stage.
"Next year," I mouthed.
She wagged one finger at me, the way you'd correct a puppy. Then she went back to her green beans.
Delphine came and found me during dessert.
"Small change of plan," she said. "Barrett's having a moment. If he chokes, we've got a backup thrower."
"Who?"
"A Mr. Haskins? Car lot? Very enthusiastic."
I looked across the hall. Ray Haskins was standing by the coffee urn. He saw me looking, and slowly, very deliberately, shook his head.
"I asked him at the door," Delphine said. "He said yes."
"Did he?"
She checked her tablet. "He said, quote, 'Not without June's yes, and not that pie.' I took that as a soft yes."
"That's a hard no," I said. "In Fernhill, that is the hardest no there is."
Delphine looked at me for a long second. Then she walked off to talk to Dr. Pruitt, who listened politely for nearly ten seconds before he started pointing at the blue tape.
Someone had moved the tape.
It was now about two paces from the chair. I saw it at the same time Dr. Pruitt did. He went pale, then red, then stood up in the middle of table four.
"That's my distance!" he said, loudly enough to stop three conversations. "That's my mistake! I made that mistake in front of God and the Lutheran choir!"
People turned. Hal turned his camera. Delphine closed her eyes like someone counting backward from ten.
Cil appeared at my elbow. "Section 7(b)," she whispered. "Page eleven, I read it last night. I'm so sorry I didn't read it first."
"You read it," I said. "That's the part that counts."
I picked up the microphone. My hands were steady, which surprised me. Then I opened the green notebook, which surprised nobody.
"Good evening," I said. "Before Pie Rights, I read the rules. Some of you know them."
"All of us know them," called Ray Haskins.
"Rule 9," I said.
And three hundred and ten people answered me.
"Six paces, marked with blue tape!"
I hadn't known they'd do that. I've read the rules aloud for fifteen years. I never once considered that anybody was listening. But there they were, saying them back to me, the way you'd say the words to a song you didn't remember learning.
Arlo jogged out with a fresh roll of tape. He measured six paces with his long, careful stride. He laid the strip down. The room applauded the tape.
"Rule 30," I said.
"No camera closer than the front row!"
Hal looked at Delphine. Delphine looked at the three hundred and ten people. Then, without a word, Hal picked up his tripod and walked it back behind Hattie's chair. Hattie patted it, as though it were a well-behaved pony.
"Rule 4."
"Soft pie only!" The room didn't stop there. "If it would hurt to drop on a cat, it is not a pie!"
Somebody at table eleven meowed. It was the bowling league. It is always the bowling league.
"Rule 13," I said.
"Say crumb and everything stops!"
A few people giggled afterward. It is a silly word to shout in unison. In fifteen years, nobody had ever said it for real, and the whole room knew that. It had become a sort of town joke, like the stop sign on Elm that nobody stops at because it faces a field.
Nico came out from the kitchen with two pies on a tray. Graham crust, plain cream, and the backup, because of Rule 22. He set the tray on a small table by the stage. Then he stood beside it with his arms folded, like a man guarding a border.
"There are no Labradors tonight," he announced to the room. "I checked."
Then Barrett came out.
He wore the white jacket with his name on it three times. He stopped at the edge of the stage and looked out at all those faces.
Something seemed to happen to his knees. He didn't move for a long moment. I knew that moment. I had stood in it fifteen times, from the other side.
Then he unbuttoned the jacket and took it off.
Under it, he wore a gray T-shirt from the Fernhill Community Pantry. It said VOLUNTEER on the back. Arlo had given it to him on Friday. I hadn't known he'd kept it.
The room didn't quite know what to do with that. So they cheered.
"Final bid for Pie Rights," Cil announced. "Forty thousand dollars, from Mr. Vane and the network."
She paused. "And another nine thousand, four hundred dollars from the rest of you, who lost and gave it anyway. That's a hundred and forty-eight thousand meals."
The room cheered the meals.
I sat in the chair. I set the rulebook on my knees. I looked out at Hattie, who gave me a small nod, the way a coach nods at a gymnast.
"Rule 1," I said into the microphone. "Yes. Out loud, on the day."
Barrett stepped up to the blue tape. Nico handed him a pie from the tray.
"Rule 6," I said. "Count of three."
"One!" said three hundred and ten people.
Barrett lifted the pie, underhand, like a present. I watched the pie the way I've watched fifteen pies.
That's when I saw it.
It didn't wobble.
Nico's pies wobble. They wobble when you carry them and when you set them down. Arlo once filmed one wobbling for ninety seconds and called it breathing. Fifteen years of pies have come at me, and every single one of them shivered a little on the way.
This one sat in Barrett's hands as still as a dinner plate. The cream on top was too smooth and too white. And around the rim, where the cream ran thin, I saw a line of something that caught the stage light and threw it back.
Mirror glaze.
"Two!"
Across the room, by the kitchen door, Delphine was not looking at me. She was looking at her smaller tablet, and the woman holding it was looking at the floor.
Barrett drew his arm back.
I had never said it. Not in fifteen years. I had kept it in the notebook the way you keep a spare key under a flowerpot, for a day you hope never comes.
I stood up out of the chair.
"Crumb," I said.
Up next: Rule Thirty-Nine
Continue to Part 6 →