I laid my hand on the white envelope. “Stacy, that company writes to me because they bought my shoofly pie recipe,” I said. “The one my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother made in Martinsburg with molasses, brown sugar and a crumb top that people fought over. They paid me five million one hundred thousand dollars in the spring, and there will be frozen Dutch Country pies in grocery stores from here to California.” I slid the contract across the table. “Darren told you that pies were not a business. I baked in a coal fired oven for fifty years, and there was a line of people at the farmers market every Saturday.”
Darren cleared his throat. “Mom, the township never said a word about the lease. I only did what was best for the family.” “Mr. Weyandt told me over a cup of coffee, son,” I said. “Fourteen hundred dollars a month, for thirty six months. Fifty thousand four hundred dollars. All of it paid to you. You told me the township had built a new garage. You told me they had moved out. They never moved. The plows are in the garage of your father this very minute.” I laid the township payment record beside the pie plate. “Ervin said that building would take care of me. You took care of yourself.”
Stacy put the brochure down and pushed it away from her with one finger. “Darren, the hunting cabin. You said it came from your side jobs.” “It was a good price, Stacy,” Darren said weakly. A freight train blew its whistle, climbing toward the Horseshoe Curve, and the old clock above the stove ticked on. Stacy looked at the tin pie plate from nineteen forty and then at her husband, and I saw her understand something that had been waiting for her for years. I reached over and put my hand on her shoulder. She leaned into it for a moment like a girl.
A tin pie plate from nineteen forty gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the garage in Altoona.
I kept my voice even, the way I roll out a crust. “Here are my terms, Darren. You will call Mr. Weyandt tonight and tell him the truth, and from this month on the township will pay the lease to me. You will repay the fifty thousand four hundred dollars, every cent, in payments that Stacy and I will set, and you will not borrow to do it. The hunting cabin goes on the market on Monday. And I will move out of the sewing room by the end of the month, because I have bought a small house on Seventeenth Avenue with a kitchen big enough for four pies at once.” Darren nodded and put his face in his hands.
On Saturday I went to the farmers market, and I found a surprise waiting. Mr. Weyandt had told the other men at the township garage, and a line of plow drivers in orange jackets stood waiting at my table. One by one they bought a pie. A very big man named Duane took off his cap and said, “Mrs. Stiffler, we kept the garage of Ervin tidy, and we paid on time, and we never knew a thing. If we had known, we would have brought the check to your door.” I told him I knew, and I thanked him, and I handed him a second pie free of charge.
The money consequences came without delay. Darren sold the hunting cabin at a loss of fourteen thousand dollars, and he took a second job at a lumber yard, working evenings. Stacy opened her own account and kept the books. Her parents, who had planned to help them buy a bigger house, set the plan aside until they could see a year of honest work. The township, being fair, agreed to continue paying the lease, but to me directly, by check, with a note thanking me for the use of the garage. I framed the first one and hung it in the new kitchen.
I wanted to turn the sorrow into something sweet. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of Ervin. The Ervin Stiffler Fund pays for the winter heating bills of seniors in Blair County who cannot afford to stay warm. Every Thanksgiving, I deliver a shoofly pie with each check, still warm from the oven. Last year we helped one hundred and forty households. A woman in Tyrone met me at her door and held the pie against her chest with both hands. “Billie,” she said, “nobody has brought me a pie in eleven years.”
Stacy came to see me at the new house, carrying a bag of flour and a nervous smile. She asked if I would teach her to make a crumb top. I put an apron on her and set her at my counter with a bowl of butter and brown sugar. Her first crumb was too fine and her second too coarse. By the fifth, she had learned to pinch it with her fingertips and let it fall like gravel. When the pie came out of the oven, golden and sweet, she cried over it. “Billie,” she said, “I think this is the first thing I have made in my life that I am proud of.”
Darren took longer. For two months he came by every Sunday, sat on the porch, and said very little. Then one morning I handed him a rolling pin and a lump of dough and said, “Roll.” He rolled it too thin. He rolled it again, and it tore. The third time, the dough lay smooth and even on the board, and he stared at it as if he had made gold. “Mom,” he said, “I never knew this was so hard.” I told him that most good things look easy to the person who has not tried them. He nodded and wiped the flour from his hands.
At the fire company carnival in September, the whole family stood behind my pie table, wearing aprons and smiling at the long line. Darren cut slices. Stacy boxed them. The sun came down golden over the ballfield, and a freight train sounded low and far away. I held up the tin pie plate that my grandmother had used in nineteen forty, empty and gleaming, and showed it to the crowd. “Every pie begins with a plate,” I told them, “and a family to eat it.” The crowd cheered, and a little girl asked for a second slice, and I gave her two.
