Something shifted in his face. Not quite a smile. Close to one. "You know that pie? My mother made it every Christmas."
Margaret said, "It's a good pie. Takes longer than most." He nodded slowly. "I don't suppose you'd He stopped again, recalibrated. I don't want to put you out.
I'll bring one next Sunday," Margaret said. "No extra charge." He looked at her with an expression. and she couldn't fully read something careful in it, something that wasn't quite comfortable yet with whatever it was. "That's too generous," he said. "It's a pie, Mr. Brooks," she said.
"Not a land deed." He made a sound that was the closest thing to a laugh she had ever heard from him. Quick and almost surprised, and he said, "Fair enough," and paid for the apple cinnamon and walked away. She watched him go. She told herself she was not going to think about that sound for the rest of the week.
She thought about it for the rest of the week. The dried cherry pie took her most of Saturday to make right. The almond crust was finicky. Her mother used to say it had a temper, and she was right. And Margaret had to start the crust over once because the butter was wrong, and a crust with wrong butter was not a crust worth serving.
She worked through the afternoon and into the evening. And when she finally got it right, when the color was good and the smell coming out of that oven was the smell she remembered from childhood Christmases. Before everything got hard, she sat down at the kitchen table and pressed her hands flat on the wood and let herself have one single minute of feeling something. Her mother's recipe. Her mother's kitchen, more or less.
The same cast iron stove, older now. The same low lamp. the same view from the window of the field that needed more than she could give it. 1 minute. Then she got up and wrapped the pie and went to bed. The next morning, when Nathan took the dried cherry pie from her hands and she explained that the almond crust needed about 20 minutes to set after it cooled before it would cut clean, he listened with the particular attention of a man who intended to repeat the information accurately.
She realized he was going to go home and tell Emily exactly what she'd said, word for word. And for some reason that undid her a little in a way she hadn't expected. She kept her face still. She handed him his change. He said simply, "She's going to be very happy and nodded and left."