She slammed the last pie tin down so hard the table shook. And every woman at that church market turned to stare because Margaret Dawson had just heard one sentence too many. Nobody's ever going to love a woman built like you, honey. Not out here. Not anywhere.
She didn't cry. She didn't answer. She just stood there, all 260 lbs of her, in her flower dusted apron, with her hands pressed flat against that wooden table, breathing slow, staring at the rows of golden pies she had spent all night baking, and she made herself a promise that Sunday morning that she would not let a single one of them see her break. The first Sunday, Margaret Dawson set up her pie table at the Willow Creek Church Market. She arrived before sunrise, not because she was eager, because she was afraid that if she arrived when the other vendors were already there watching, she would lose her nerve entirely and turn the cart around and go home.
And if she went home, she would have nothing left. No plan, no money past the end of the month, no family to call on, nothing but a cold house and the faded recipe book her mother had pressed into her hands 3 weeks before she died. You make beautiful things, Margaret," her mother had whispered from the bed where she'd spent the last year of her life. "Don't you let anybody tell you different." Margaret had nodded and held her mother's hand and smiled the way you smile when you are trying to make a dying woman feel at peace.
She hadn't believed a word of it. Not really. She'd spent 30 years being told the opposite by people who said it louder and more often and with a great deal more conviction than her mother ever managed from that sick bed. But she set up her table anyway. She had six pies, apple, cinnamon, blackberry, peach with brown sugar crust, two more apple because apple was what her mother had always said people came back for, and one sweet potato that she'd made on impulse at 2:00 in the morning when sleep wouldn't come, and her hands needed something to do besides shake.
She arranged them on the cloth she'd ironed three times because it kept wrinkling. and she stood behind that table in her good dress, the blue one that pulled a little tight across the shoulders now, but was still the nicest thing she owned, and she waited. People walked past. Most of them didn't even glance at the table. A few glanced and kept walking. One woman stopped, looked at the pies, looked at Margaret, and moved on.
Without a word, her mouth pressed into a thin line like she'd decided something. Margaret kept her face still. She was good at keeping her face still. 29 years of practice starting from the schoolyard in Carson Falls where the boys had first started calling her names. She'd spent the rest of her life pretending not to remember.
It was around 9:00 in the morning when she first heard it. Two women maybe 40 ft away speaking in the carrying voices of people who have no particular interest in being discreet. Is that the Dawson girl lord? She's gotten big. She was always big.