That's no excuse, Mrs. Henderson said. She took her pie and gave the boys a look that sent them scattering. And then she gave Margaret a look that was meant to be sympathetic and was Margaret supposed, even if it also made her feel like something that needed tending. She smoothed the cloth on her table. She looked out at the market and the crowd and the clear autumn sky.
She did not see Nathan Brooks for another 20 minutes. And by then, the boys were long gone and she had sold two more pies, and she was not going to think about it anymore, except that when he reached her table, something in his face was different. Not pity, nothing like pity. It was something quieter and harder, something behind his eyes that she might have called anger if it hadn't been so carefully contained. He didn't say anything about the boys.
She didn't know whether he had seen or whether someone had told him or whether she was imagining the whole thing. He looked at the remaining pies. "What do you recommend today?" he asked. It was the second question he had ever asked her. She was surprised enough that she answered honestly.
"The peach," she said. "I got the peaches from the Henderson farm Mrs. Henderson just left with the blackberry, and they were good this week. Sweet all the way through." He nodded. I'll trust your judgment.
She wrapped the peach. She was aware in a way she hadn't been before, that her hands were large and that the skin was rough from years of work. And she made herself stop being aware of it and just wrapped the pie the way she always did. He paid. He picked up the pie.
And then he said so quietly that she had to pay attention to hear it over the market noise. Those were good boys once. probably somebody failed them. She didn't know what to say to that. He nodded his usual nod and walked away. She stood behind her table for a long moment after he'd gone, and she thought that was maybe the strangest and most decent thing anyone had said to her in years.
Not I'm sorry. Not It's not so bad. Not boys will be boys. Just a quiet accounting of where cruelty came from and who was actually to blame for it. She drove home that evening with two unsold pies and $12 and something she could not quite name lodged somewhere beneath her sternum.
She put the kettle on. She sat at her mother's table. She ate a slice of the leftover peach and thought about a man who bought pie every Sunday and never once said a single word about how she looked. Outside the aspens had turned gold and the nights were getting cold. And somewhere across town, Nathan Brooks was carrying pie through his front door to two daughters who had been waiting for it all morning.