She looked at the empty space behind her table where she usually stood waiting for people who didn't come. She said, "I only brought eight today." The man in line said, "That's fine. I just want a slice." "I sell whole pies," Margaret said.
"Then I'll take a whole one." She sold out in 40 minutes. 40 minutes where before the festival, her best Sunday had been 3 hours to move six pies. She turned away four people after the last pie was gone. And she did it politely and with genuine regret, and she drove home with empty hands and more money than she had made in any single Sunday before.
And she sat in her kitchen with the money on the table and felt something she had not felt in a very long time. She felt wanted, not pied, not tolerated, not the complicated mix of charity and awkwardness that she had learned to receive without letting it show on her face. just wanted. People had stood in a line for what she made before she had finished setting up because someone had told them it was worth standing in line for. She pressed her hands flat on the table and breathed. Then she got out her mother's recipe book and started calculating.
If she made 12 pies next Sunday instead of eight, she would need to start Friday. She had enough supplies for 10 without another trip to the general store. She could do 10 on Friday production and two Saturday morning for freshness, which meant the sweet potatoes needed to be Thursday. She wrote it down in the margin of the recipe book. The way her mother used to write things in the white spaces between the ingredients because that was where the real thinking happened.
She had just finished the calculation when someone knocked on her door. It was Thursday in her memory when she thought about it later, though it might have been Wednesday. The days had been moving differently since the festival faster and slower at once, and time had stopped behaving in the reliable way it usually did. Whoever came to the door that evening, it was not Nathan, and it was not Patricia Haynes, and it was not anyone she had been expecting. It was Clara Hutchkins alone.
Margaret opened the door and they looked at each other for a moment on the threshold and Margaret thought with a steadiness that surprised her. Whatever this is, I am not going to be afraid of it. I won't take much of your time, Clara said. She held herself in the careful way of a woman who had decided something and was not entirely comfortable with it. I came to say something that I should have said differently before.
Margaret waited. Clara looked at the door frame. She looked at Margaret. She said, "I was unkind to you more than once, and I told myself I was being practical, and I told myself I was saying things that needed saying, and I told myself a lot of things." She paused.
I watched you walk up to that platform on Saturday. I watched your face. Another pause. You weren't surprised to be there. You weren't embarrassed.