Margaret Dawson washed her dish and banked the fire and went to bed. She did not let herself hope. Not yet. But for the first time in a very long time, she did not actively talk herself out of it either. And in the territory of a woman who had spent 30 years learning to want nothing, that was something close to everything.
The week after Nathan said what he said about the boys, Margaret almost didn't come back. She had stood in her kitchen that Saturday night with her hands in the dough and her mind somewhere else entirely turning it over and over the way you turn a stone in your palm to see if it's worth keeping. A man who bought pie every Sunday. A man who asked two questions in 6 weeks and both of them landed softer than anything she'd been handed in years. a man who had said quiet enough that she had to lean in to catch it. That somebody had failed those boys.
Not poor Margaret, not I'm sorry that happened, but a clean, clear accounting of where cruelty started and who was actually responsible for it. She had thought about that sentence for 6 days straight. And she had decided, standing there with flower on her wrists and the lamp burning low, that she was not going to build anything on top of it. Not a single hope, not a single quiet daydream at the kitchen table. She knew what she looked like.
She knew what Willow Creek thought of her. She had spent 30 years learning that lesson. And she was not about to unlearn it over a man who was probably just lonely and happened to like apple cinnamon. She told herself all of that. Then she made eight pies anyway and drove to the market before sunrise.
She told herself it was about the money and it was mostly. November was 6 weeks out and she had enough saved to cover rent through January if she was careful. But careful wasn't the same as comfortable and comfortable wasn't the same as safe. And she had not felt safe in so long that she had forgotten what the inside of it felt like. So she came back.
She set up her table. She ironed the cloth twice because it kept wrinkling. and she had nowhere better to put her hands at 11:00 on a Saturday night. Nathan came at his usual time, which was somewhere between 9 and 10 after the early church crowd had thinned and before the midday rush pushed everyone together. He wore his brown coat with the worn elbows and his hat was pulled down against the wind because October had finally arrived in full and it was carrying an edge. He looked at the pies.
He said, "Morning, morning," she said. He pointed at the apple cinnamon. She reached for it and he said, "Actually," and stopped. She looked up. He looked like a man choosing words carefully, which was not a look she had seen on him before.
He said, "Emily asked me to ask you something. She wanted to know if you'd ever made a pie with dried cherries. She read about it somewhere, one of those books her teacher lends out, and she's been talking about it for 3 days." Margaret looked at him. Dried cherry with almond crust.