You walked up there like you had every right to the ground under your feet. and I she stopped. Something moved through her expression that was unfamiliar, something that might have been recognition. I haven't been a fair person to you. Margaret said nothing for a moment. She thought about the thin smile, the looking her up and down, the word ingratiating, the procedural review that hadn't been a procedural review.
She said, "No, you haven't." Clara absorbed that without flinching. I know. Why? Margaret said it came out before she'd fully decided to say it.
Not why are you here now? Why did you do it in the first place? Clara was quiet for long enough that Margaret thought she might not answer. Then she said, "Because I was afraid of you." Margaret stared at her.
"Not of you exactly," Clara said, correcting herself with the precision of someone who had been thinking about this for days. of what you were doing without knowing you were doing it. You were just standing there every Sunday, just standing there being. She made a gesture with one hand that was frustrated and small, decent, and people were noticing. And Nathan Brooks, who is the best man in this county, and who I spent the better part of two years trying to interest in my friend's youngest daughter, who is very pretty and very suitable. He was walking past everyone else and going to your table.
She said the last part with an honesty that cost her something. I couldn't understand it, so I tried to remove it. The evening wind moved through the gap in the door. Margaret said, "I'm not in competition with anyone, Mrs. Hutchkins." "I know that now," Clara said.
"That's part of what made it worse." She looked at her hands. "I don't expect forgiveness. I just needed to say it plainly without dressing it up. She looked up.
You make a very good pie, Margaret. It deserved to win. Margaret looked at this woman who had made the last four months harder than they needed to be. And she thought about her mother, who had always said that people who were cruel were usually afraid of something, and that understanding the fear didn't erase the cruelty, but it changed the shape of it. She said, "Thank you for coming."
Clara nodded once stiffly and left. Margaret closed the door and stood in her kitchen and thought about fear and decent people and what it cost to say plainly what you had done when you would have preferred not to. She went back to her recipe book. She started the sweet potato pies Thursday morning as planned. Nathan came Sunday at his usual time.