And I bought the pie and I went home and we ate it. And for the first time in 2 years, the kitchen smelled like something was happening. The lamp was burning low. Outside the Montana night had gone full cold and dark. Margaret said, "You came back the next week."
"I came back the next week," he said. She said, "You never said anything about any of this." "No," he said. "I didn't know how yet, and I didn't want to." He chose the words carefully.
"I didn't want to hand you someone else's grief and call it a reason to be kind to me. That didn't seem right." She looked at him for a long time. She thought about eight Sundays, 12 Sundays. The questions, "How long do you bake them?"
Did your mother teach you which one is your favorite? So quiet, so unhurried, so much like a man learning the shape of something important at a pace that respected it. She said, "Can I tell you something?" He nodded. "I almost didn't come back after the second Sunday," she said.
"I had sold two pies. I thought it wasn't worth it. I thought she looked at her hands. I had spent a long time telling myself that wanting things was how you got hurt, that it was smarter to need less, want less, take up less room. She pressed her hands flat.
I came back because I had four pies that would go to waste. That's what I told myself. But that wasn't why, he said. Not a question. I don't know why, she said honestly.
I just came back. And then the next week, I came back again. And somewhere in there, I stopped asking myself why. He said very quietly, "I'm glad you did." The words sat in the room, and neither of them moved, and the fire in the stove made its small sounds, and outside the cottonwood branches knocked in the wind, and Margaret Dawson sat at a kitchen table at the end of a Friday evening, and felt with a clarity that was almost frightening that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
She did not know what to do with that feeling. She had never had it before. She said, "It scared me when I realized I had started looking forward to Sundays." He said, "Me, too." She looked at him.