“Stay for the Pie” by Kelly Barnhill

Evening Diner, by Ann Sheng

“Now who,” Elsa Bjerkstad asked herself, “would do a thing like that on a night like this?” She reached over to the droning radio, her floured fingers pausing at the speaker to give a little tap hello to the voice of Henry Mortensen who intoned urgently over the wires – well, urgent for a bachelor – before turning it off with a satisfying click. She did not care – not even slightly – who murdered whom. Not when there were pies to make. Not when a moon like that – like that! – hung like a painted lamp in the sky. “Sorry, Henry,” she said apologetically. The silent radio, of course, said nothing.

Elsa sighed and returned to the business of pie crust. It was too bad. She liked Henry. And while she had turned down his shrugging proposal for marriage not once but four times since the death of her husband, she honestly enjoyed his company on the radio each night when she worked late and alone.

It was a beautiful moon, large and tawny, and it took up nearly the entire window. Norse Hollow read backwards against its upper curve, as though it was a gigantic and free advertising campaign. The thought pleased her. She pushed in the dough, leaving a cloudy shape of her hand ghosting the center.

Outside, the wind shirred the papery leaves of the sugar maple just out the door. It was warm for the first of October, and Elsa had arrived two hours before without her coat, though she was sure to miss it when she went home at midnight after locking up. Tuesdays were always empty, but Elsa liked it that way. Pie was, after all, serious business, and she needed to concentrate to get it right. Elsa always got it right. The crust melted on the tongue, the fruit slid sweetly from lips to throat. People trembled, sighed, and rubbed their bellies. Families were united for the sake of these pies, divorces averted, soured business partnerships saved. Elsa didn’t try to explain it. She just made pie. And Tuesday night’s pie was special. Plum, caramelized with brown sugar and doused with raw cream. These she assembled herself, when the restaurant was empty and still. Every Tuesday, she made eight, seven for the restaurant and one for herself, which she doled out sparingly to neighbors who needed it. Truckers, hauling loads through the upper Midwest, arranged their routes to ensure an early Wednesday lunch at Norse Hollow. The bank shut down for an hour on Wednesday. Even the high school principal showed up. By mid-afternoon, the plums were gone, and customers had to satiate themselves with apple or rhubarb or peach preserves.

She had just put the first batch in the oven and placed the sugared plums under the broiler for the next batch, when the door opened to the tinkling of bells and a man walked in. Old, she thought, and, realizing that he couldn’t be much older than herself, she immediately raised her hand to her blonded hair that she twisted each day into a long, swooped knot. She smoothed her hair back and smiled.

“Out for a walk?” she asked, as though she had known the man all her life. She had never seen him before, which meant, of course that he could not have walked. But still, she reasoned, it was such nice evening. And the moon . . . Well, it was a lovely moon.

He looked at her strangely, as though she was a ghost. He jerked his head slightly – nervous tic, she thought – put his hands into the patch pockets of his tan canvas coat and shook his keys. “No,” he said, taking his hands out again, they were thin and spotted, the knuckles swollen with arthritis. “Just passing through, I guess. Is it too late for dinner?”

The timer beeped. She turned. “Not at all. Sit down at the counter and take a look at the menu.” She removed the plums and laid the pans on the cooling rack. Peering over her shoulder to make sure he wasn’t watching, she grabbed the bowl at the edge of the rack and began sprinkling the minced fresh mint, that she grew in her garden in the summer and in pots in her house during the rest of the year, chopped so fine it hung on the fruit like lace, and let everything cool.

He looked up. “Smells delicious.”

She pursed her lips. “Of course it does.” He nodded and returned to the menu. He ordered the chili, a choice she approved of, and the cornbread, and a salad. She shook her head. “You don’t want a salad,” she told him.

“Yes I do,” he said, his large lips flat against a wrinkled chin.

She sighed. “At your age, raw vegetables do more harm than good. Have the green beans. They’re wonderful. I made them myself.”

He scowled and ordered the green beans.

She scooped a steaming ladleful of chili into a white bowl and set it down in front of him with a napkin and a spoon. She spooned a cheerful mound of butter onto the yellow cornbread and warmed it in the microwave along with the green beans. The man said nothing, but stared at his hands as he waited. Inside the oven, the pies bubbled happily. Elsa paused, brought her hand as close to the oven door as she dared, and breathed it in. She flipped the radio back on and busied herself with the crusts of the next batch of pies. Henry had, thankfully, stopped talking about the murdered man and had resumed his nightly list of big band favorites. She peered over at the man at the counter who was, apparently, waiting for the chili to cool. He was a short, squat, slumpy man, with rounded shoulders and very little neck. In fact, with the several dark splotches that dotted his hands and face, she thought he looked very much like a very old bullfrog. He lifted the spoon to his mouth; she heard it click against his long, yellowed teeth. She cringed slightly, but still gave an encouraging nod. He continued to eat.

“Duke Ellington,” she said, nodding towards the radio as her fingers deftly pressed the cool dough into the pans. “My husband used to love that music. He was the only one in school who did. Everyone else liked – you know – more modern music. Not my Marty.” She shrugged. “Now I can’t get enough of it.” He peered up at the shelf full of Norwegian inspired knick-knacks. In the center were two framed pictures of men in uniform, one old, one new.

“That your husband?” the man asked, pointing to the older photograph.

She smiled, nodded, and did not turn to look. She did not need to.

“And that’s your son, I guess.”

Her smile tightened in her mouth. “Yes,” she said. “He’s due home next year.” She did not say that he was supposed to already be home. Why, she wondered, do we always trouble strangers with our problems? She pressed dough, more vigorously now. “He’s a linguist for the Army. They have him at Kandahar for the time being.”

The man took another bite of chili. It seeped at the edges of his wide mouth. “He’s a brave boy,” he said. “You must be proud of him.” He swallowed. “This chili is delicious.”

She set her mouth and did not smile. She detested people telling her how she must feel. She wanted her boy, but no one asked her that, did they? Carefully, she ladled the plums into the piecrusts. The pale green leaves clung damply to the dark, sweet fruit. The song ended, and Henry Mortensen’s voice came back over the radio.

“Yeah, I just got a call from Morey Stenglein, who followed Kenny out to the house?” She glanced at her customer who didn’t appear to have heard. She wanted to tell him that it was Henry’s habit to speak in question marks, and though it made him sound like an idiot, he was actually quite nice. “If you’re just coming in, it looks like Randall Kiersch has been murdered in his own house – his own front door, you know?. The assailant-” Elsa shook her head. Knowing Henry, he had probably waited his whole life to be able to say the word “assailant” on the radio. Henry cleared his throat. “The assailant appears to have taken Randall’s car but left his own. Pff. Some people, you know, kind of deserve to get caught? Morey tells me that the police are running the plates as we speak.” She clicked it off and turned to the stranger with a shrug.

“Things like that don’t happen here very often, and when they do, we’re likely to get a little loony.” He did not respond but stared at his chili, rearranging the damp hunks of beef with the back of his spoon. “If it was going to happen to anyone, though, well . . . ” she smoothed her hair with the back of her hand. “I guess it’s not very nice to say this, but of all people-” She paused. “I can’t really say he had it coming. That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it? But I’m not surprised. He’s been cooking that meth for the last – heck, I don’t know, ever since he moved here, I guess. We never had a problem before that. Now every trucker keeps it in their glove compartment. Sad, but there it is.” Assuming he must be uncomfortable, she changed the subject. “Your family live around here?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “No one in my family lives around here. Actually, no one lives anywhere. Don’t have much of a family to speak of. My wife died last year.”

Elsa clucked her tongue. “It’s a terrible thing, to lose your spouse. Terrible. Happens to all of us, one way or anther, though, doesn’t it?” She sipped her coffee. It was cold. “Well, half of us, anyway. Good thing they don’t tell the young people that, or no one would bother getting married in the first place.” He smiled and took a bite. “Any kids?”

“My son. We . . . well, we’re not close.” He shoved a forkful of green beans into his mouth and chewed slowly. Turning his head away, he looked down at the surface of the counter, as though he was reading the newspaper, but nothing was there. She shrugged and returned to her pies. She preferred the quiet anyway.

Elsa poured cream over the plums and set precut circles of dough over each one. The oven hummed and whirred, the first four browning inside. The scent blew over the countertops, hung on the leaves of the fake hibiscus plant, rested on her shoulders, his shoulders. He laid his chin on the heel of his hand. Somewhere, an engine revved and a dog barked. Somewhere a siren called to the farms, to the moon, to the wind swept sky.

“Well,” she said, running her fingers deftly along the edges of the pie, squeezing dough into a long, undulating wave circling infinitely over itself, “not everyone is lucky in that way. And I mean it when I say luck. Young people today talk about parenting ‘skills’, but there’s really no skill to it. Just luck.” This, of course was not true. Elsa did not believe in luck. Skill, and skill alone, made her Charlie what he was. But she was a modest woman, and called it luck. The man nodded appreciatively, and closed his eyes, breathing in deeply through his nose.

“That pie smells good enough to eat,” he said. “Better. I’ve never smelled anything like it.”

She grabbed the trash bin and scraped the extra flour and bits of unused dough over the side of the counter. The man took a forkful of cornbread and dropped it into the deep red chili, stirring it around until it dissolved. She wrinkled her nose. She did not approve of mixing foods. When Charlie was a little boy he would shove crackers into his soup when he thought he could get away with it. He rarely could. If she caught him, she would dump it out and make him start over, saying, “A cracker is a cracker, and soup is soup. Someone worked very hard to make it just so.” And now, the Army was feeding him God knows what, and he was probably mixing the lot of it into a great glistening heap. She attacked the floor with her broom, huffing to herself. The music stopped, and Henry’s voice came back, droning once again about murder. His words tumbled over one another in a breathless rush, and Elsa knew that he most likely had a ruddy sheen of sweat on his forehead and upper lip that would be far from attractive. “Good thing,” she decided, “we never married.” And then she looked out the window and stopped breathing.

The eighty-two Camaro listed slightly to the forward right, as though it was leaning in to listen to something on the ground. The hubcaps had been replaced by a set of black and gold lacquer overlays that showed the profile of an astonishingly chesty woman holding onto her knees, throwing her wavy head of hair back, as though laughing. Elsa could remember the first time Randall drove down the center of town with those hubcaps. It wasn’t so long ago, now that she thought about it. The Mayor’s wife was just coming out of church, which was always a bit of a scene, since it happened so rarely. Esla had walked just behind the chattering crowd that hovered around the Mayor’s wife, simultaneously hanging on her every word, and elbowing their own words into the gaps, trying to be heard. The Mayor’s wife was halfway down the stairs, Elsa at the top, accompanied as usual by Henry. Randall screeched to a halt, revved the engine a few times and leaned back with a black-toothed grin. Later, they would learn that the girl he was dating actually sang in the choir, and as a result of this incident, her parents sent her down to Saint Paul to live with her aunt and uncle, even though they were both Socialists and Unitarians. Her parents took one look at those hubcaps and knew that they needed to find a more wholesome environment for their youngest girl.

The Mayor’s wife, in mid-sentence, did not notice the car at first. The woman to her left gasped and covered her eyes. The woman to her left brought her hands to her heart and exclaimed, “Dear God, what is that doing here?” The Mayor’s wife, noticing that something was definitely up, took stock of the situation, and promptly fainted dead away.

Standing at the top of the stairs, Elsa saw Randall chuckle to himself and nod slowly in what could only be seen as a self-satisfied expression. Turning to Henry, she said, “I don’t care if he is the most talented mechanic in the world. I don’t like that boy.” The ladies on the stairs fanned the Mayor’s wife with their programs, the choirgirl skipped by and climbed into the passenger seat, and Randall sped away.

The Mayor, at the behest of his wife, introduced an ordinance that very week banning the use of pornographic images, including the suggestion of pornographic images, on automobiles inside the limits of the town, but the council voted it down on the grounds that it a.) would not hold up in court, and b.) was a load of crap. Elsa heard the entire debate since council meetings often moved from the Town Hall to Norse Hollow due to the fact that four of the council members were allergic to the mold spores in the carpet. Or at least they claimed to be allergic. The first meeting, accompanied by a slightly bitter rhubarb pie was terse and waspish with no real resolution. The second meeting, held on a Wednesday morning accompanied by an entire plum pie, was a more conciliatory affair, leading to a resolution to send an envoy to talk to Randall about the offensive hubcaps.

They sent Elsa. She brought pie. Randall was not home, and the entire farmhouse stank of chemicals and bile. The grass surrounding the house had been burned by ammonia, and the three apple trees, planted lovingly by the previous owners, stood withered and gray in the waning sunlight. She left the pie on the porch with a note and a shrug. She did not think it would come to any good. For all she knew, one of the dogs ate it.

Elsa held her broom with both fists, held on tight, as though she could fly away. Randall’s car, hubcaps and all, shone dull and yellow in the lamplight, dry leaves rattling behind like burdensome chains. She half expected it to start moaning. Slowly, she turned to the man at the counter. He was small, shorter than her, though he clearly weighed more. She wondered idly if she’d be able to take him in a fist fight. Probably not, but it might be worth a shot.

The timer beeped and she nearly fell over. The broom fell to the ground after hitting two chrome chairs along the way with what seemed to her to be a deafening rattle. He looked up, turned and stared at her. She reddened, and realized with horror that her hands were shaking violently. She shoved them into the pockets of her apron.

“Butterfingers,” she said, her voice weak. The man smiled, a shy, self-deprecating smile with half his mouth.

“I-” he said and stopped. He held his fingers to his lips and swallowed, then reached back and grabbed a napkin to brush away any stray crumbs. “I have the same problem.” He held up his hands. “They’ve never been steady. Especially when I need it.”

Elsa walked back to the oven, making sure to give a wide berth, in case he might try something. Still, she wondered, what on earth could he do? He didn’t appear as though he could even kill a weasel in the henhouse, much less a meth-cooking criminal like Randall. She opened the oven and pulled the four pies out, laying them on the rack to cool. Keeping it open, she slid the other four inside. The old man sighed.

“That smell,” he said shaking his head. “I’ve never smelled anything like it. It must be bad for business. You’d have people in here all day, just smelling those pies and not eating a bite.”

“My husband used to say we should charge people for scent inhalation. But it would have screwed up our sales tax withholdings, so he decided to skip it.” She looked back up at the photographs. It would be a !@#$%^&* shame, of course, if she got shot in the restaurant. Mostly, it would be bad for business. As soon as Charlie got back, she intended to sell the restaurant, turn most of the money over to her son, and spend her retirement as a freelance pie chef. If there was such a thing, but she guessed she could probably swing it. She looked at the pies. They were perfect. Cutting into it now would not be ideal, but, she figured it was worth a shot.

She grabbed a plate, white with little blue folk art horses lining the edge and scooped out a slice of hot pie. Next to it (not on. Never on.), she perched a perfect mound of ice cream. “Here,” she said, sitting down next to him. “On the house.”

“Thank you,” he said, picking up a spoon, holding it over the pie, and stopping. “I’m not sure I can. The chili was so filling. Perhaps you should –”

“Eat,” she commanded. The sirens continued their high wail somewhere past the browning fields, the empty trees, the sleeping town. She took a breath and tried to contain herself. Tried a different tack.

“You said you had a son? Where does he live?”

He looked back at his hands. “Who knows,” he said. He turned to her, his wide face the color of ash. “You wouldn’t know about this. You can look at that face,” he gestured towards the photograph of Charlie with his chin. “Probably never broke a rule in his life. Or if he did, probably had a good reason. Some kids are good when they’re born and they’re good till the day they die. Others . . .” He trailed off, took a sip of his coffee and put down his spoon. Elsa grimaced. “Well, others just aren’t.”

She got up, went to the other side of the counter and cut a slice for herself. She set her plate facing his, leaned over the counter with her spoon and scooped up a steaming bite.

“Eat. It’s better when it’s hot.” This was a lie, of course. Pie is best at room temperature, and anyone fool enough to attempt to order it heated when Elsa was in earshot was likely to get a lecture. Still she took the bite of hot plum and placed it on her tongue. It burned, but she swallowed it down. “Anyway, I disagree. No one’s born bad. That’s a cop-out and I don’t like it. We all choose who we’re going to be each day. Goodness is a choice. So is wickedness. That’s why people go to church. To remind themselves that they have a choice.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “It doesn’t always help.”

He cut a c-shaped curl into the ice cream and held it in front of his mouth. “When my son turned four, he was kicked out of six different preschools. In Middle School he stole money from the collection for homeless families not once, but three times. In High School he taped a picture of his own – well, you know – on no less than forty five different library books. He said he was advertising.” He shook his head, and ate the bite of ice cream.

Elsa took another bite of pie, held it in her mouth for a moment, let her face linger for a moment in an expression of beatific wonderment before swallowing it down. Eat the pie, she thought at him. For god’s sake eat it. At the same time, she had to force down every impulse to confess, to heal, to lay her soul bare. She wanted to tell him about the time that the Mayor’s wife overpaid to the tune of fifty dollars after entertaining her in-laws at the restaurant, supplemented by more than a few nips from the silver flask she kept in her purse. She wanted to confess that she took the money, and never mentioned the overpayment. That she got her nails painted some ferocious shade of red that looked hideous and she removed it as soon as she got home. She wanted to tell him about the time she stole her father’s car to spend a few blissful hours with Marty at the turn off at county road one. How she skidded off the road and dented the shining chrome bumper. How she and Marty, giggling and deprived of underwear, pushed the gigantic vehicle out of the ditch and drove it home. How she parked the car in the driveway, dents and all, and never mentioned it to her father. How she let him believe that it must have been his own fault, and had simply forgotten about it. She wanted to tell him all these things, and had to bite her tongue hard to prevent herself from doing so.

He dug his spoon into the tip of the pie, held it at his lips. “I should have been a better father,” he said.

“Parenthood,” she said, taking another bite, egging him on, “is nothing more than a series of screw-ups. The goal is to learn from the screw-ups. It’s all we can do, when it comes down to it.”

He took a bite, held it in his mouth, and did not move. His eyes grew wide, livid, the tawny centers hovering like twin moons in a bloodshot sky. Elsa held his gaze, and, not knowing what else to do, took his hand. He squeezed it gratefully. “I should have turned him in when he was just stealing. I didn’t. I just covered for him when he needed it and ignored him the rest of the time. I should have sent him to treatment when he brought that nasty stuff into my house. I should have called the parents of that poor girl he knocked up and offered to help. I should have told him that he had a choice, but I didn’t, and now he doesn’t.”

The sirens were closer now, yelling like a child clamoring to be let in. “No one gets off the hook for having lousy parents,” Elsa said with her mouth full. “It’s his own choice to be lousy.”

He took another bite, closed his eyes, and kept on talking as though she was no longer standing there. “A week before my wife died, he showed up at the hospital while I was at work. He told her about how he went clean, how he had been wanting to get in contact with us, but he wanted to be a success. He said that his business was booming but he needed a new influx of cash to take it to the next level. Bullshit. But it worked. She emptied two of the bank accounts. She would have emptied the third, but she couldn’t remember the number. Gave him the lot. He took off, didn’t even come to the funeral.” He looked at Elsa, his eyes heavy now with tears. “You know what my wife’s last words were? She says, ‘I’m so glad we get our boy back. Our sweet little boy.’ She never knew. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.”

“What happened then?” Elsa saw the county police car pull up in front of the restaurant. Kenny Kiersch, the sheriff, stepped out and pulled the radio cord tight, whispering something into the device in his hand.

“Tracked him down. Took me a year. I guess I didn’t know what I’d do when I found him. I just wanted to find him. I wanted to tell him off, maybe kick his !@#$%^&* if I could.” He took another bite and started to sob. “Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ forgive me. My boy. My sweet little boy.”

Kenny Kiersch walked in to the tinkling of bells, followed by Warren Carpenter, his intern-turned-deputy. Kenny made eye contact with Elsa, his chin tilted upwards in a question mark. She smiled grimly and set out two plates, one on each side.

“Eat,” she said.

They were powerless. Her voice required a yes. The men sat in a thin line, heads down. And they ate.

In a moment, they would take out the hand cuffs.

In moment they would process and file and record.

In a moment there would be the belch of gasoline, the crunch of metal, the whine of hinges and locks.

Now there was only the scrape of metal on heavy ceramic plates. The grunting of satiated men. The smack of lips. Sugar on the tongue. Fruit on the soul.

Now they would swallow, nourish, and live. Elsa smiled, and brushed the flour from her hands. It was, after all, delicious pie.

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Kelly Barnhill has seen her work appear in Postscripts, Weird Tales, Fantasy, The Sun, Sybil’s Garage and other publications. Her first two novels were both published by Little, Brown, and she has another novel forthcoming from Algonquin. She lives in Minneapolis with her brilliant husband, her three evil-genius children, and her emotionally unstable dog. She blogs about her kids, writing and books at www.kellybarnhill.com