I know I didn't have to. That's why I did. She was not going to build a story on that. She was not. But standing there in the October cold with the aspen stripped bear and the harvest festival a week out and her mother's recipe book at home on the shelf where it always was, Margaret Dawson felt something she had spent 30 years learning to do without.
She felt for just a moment entirely seen. And she had absolutely no idea what to do with that. No map for it, no prior experience, no steady ground to stand on except to wrap the next pie when the next customer came and keep her hands busy and keep her face still and wait to see what Sunday would bring. The harvest festival arrived on a Saturday so cold that Margaret could see her breath when she loaded the cart at dawn. She had entered the competition two weeks earlier, not because she believed she would win, not because she had any particular appetite for standing in front of a crowd that had spent the last several months giving her reasons to stay home, but because the prize money was $40 and $40 was the difference between a winter she could manage and a winter that would break her.
She had filled out the entry form at the county clerk's office on a Wednesday afternoon while the clerk looked at her name, looked at her face, and wrote it down without comment. She had paid the $2 entry fee. She had walked out into the cold and driven home and not thought about it again until now. Now she was thinking about it. She had made four pies for the competition entry.
She could only submit one, but she had made four because she needed to know she could do it four times right before she trusted any single one of them. Apple, cinnamon, peach, dried cherry, almond, and a sweet potato with a molasses edge that her mother had called her Sunday best. She had eaten a slice of each at midnight alone in her kitchen with the lamp turned up high. And she had been honest with herself the way you had to be honest when there was no one watching. The sweet potato was the one.
It was the one her mother would have entered. It was the one that tasted like meaning it. She wrapped it carefully and set it in the cart beside the six pies she was bringing to sell. And she drove to town in the gray early morning and told herself she was not nervous. She was nervous.
The harvest festival grounds were already crowded when she arrived. Vendors and families and children running loose in the cold, and the competition tent was a large canvas structure in the center of the grounds that smelled of sawdust and baked sugar, and the particular tension of people who wanted something badly and had made things with their hands to try to get it. Margaret checked in at the registration table, set her sweet potato pie on the numbered stand assigned to her number 14 near the back, which suited her fine, and then went to set up her selling table near the east edge of the grounds. She was arranging the cloth when she heard the first comment. It came from two women at the registration table she'd just left, not attempting to be quiet the way people spoke when they had decided you either couldn't hear or didn't count.
Is that the Dawson woman? She entered the open category. Apparently, a short pause. Well, that takes nerve. Margaret set out her first pie.
The judges aren't going to give it to her. You know how Haron Fitch judges these things. He's not going to stand up in front of this town and hand first prize to a breath, a meaningful silence. Her. Margaret set out her second pie.