The box landed upside down, three feet away, with a soft, terrible sound.
Vern lay on the gravel for a moment, on his side, with the wind knocked out of him. His knee was on fire. His palms were scraped. His clean shirt was dusty.
He did not care about any of it.
He crawled over to the pie box on his hands and knees and turned it right side up and opened the lid.
The pie was still in its tin. Mostly. But the lattice was smashed. The top crust had folded in on itself like a collapsed tent. Cherries and dark red juice had splashed up all over the inside of the box. One whole side of the crust had broken off and was lying in a corner, in pieces.
Vern knelt in the gravel and looked at it.
It was eight-thirty-eight.
"Vern."
He looked up. Dot Kessler was standing over him, in her apron, with a coffee cup in her hand. She ran the diner's pie booth at the fair every year, in the food tent by the parking lot. She had seen him fall from forty feet away.
"Are you hurt?" she said.
"No."
"Don't lie to me, Vern Ostrander."
"My knee," Vern said. "It's fine." He looked down at the box. "The pie's not."
Dot crouched down beside him on the gravel, slowly, because her knees were seventy-one, and looked into the box.
She did not say anything for a moment.
"I could give you one of mine," she said quietly. "From the booth. I've got two cherry."
Vern shook his head.
"That'd be your pie, Dot," he said. "Not mine."
Dot looked at him for a long time.
"Then enter that one," she said.
"Dot, look at it."
"I'm looking at it," Dot said. "It's a cherry pie. With a lattice top. It's just had a rough morning." She stood up and held out her hand. "Same as you. Come on. You've got twenty minutes."
Vern limped into the exhibit hall at eight-fifty-two, holding the box in both hands, with Dot beside him holding his elbow.
The pie tables were already full. Fifty-one pies in rows on white paper, under the big fans. Perfect pies. Golden pies. Pies with crimped edges and leaf cutouts and egg-washed tops that shone like varnish. Apple and cherry and peach and pecan and lemon meringue three inches tall.
The lady at the entry desk was a retired postmistress named Doris Weldy, who had known Vern for sixty years. She looked at his dusty shirt. She looked at his scraped hands. She looked into the box.
"Oh, Vern," she said.
"I'd like to enter it, please," Vern said. "Open Class. Cherry."
Doris looked at Dot. Dot looked back at her steadily.
Doris took the entry form. She read it. Her eyebrows went up when she got to the bottom line. She looked at Vern again, differently this time.
Then she wrote out an entry tag, number fifty-two, in her neat postmistress handwriting, and tied it to the box with a piece of string, and carefully lifted the broken pie out onto a paper plate, and set it on the end of the last table, beside a perfect peach pie with a crimped crust.
"Name of pie goes on the card," she said quietly. "The judge reads every card."
The judging was at one o'clock. It was open to the public.
There were about a hundred people in the folding chairs. Vern sat in the back row. Dot sat on one side of him and Floyd Eckert sat on the other, with his walker parked in the aisle, because Floyd had said he would not miss this for a hundred dollars. Half the Liars' Table was in the row in front of them.
Arlene Hupp came out at one o'clock sharp.
She was seventy-seven. Small and straight-backed, with short white hair and reading glasses on a chain and a white judge's apron over a blue dress. She carried a clipboard and a stack of scorecards and a glass of water to clear her palate.
Vern had not been this close to her in years. He had seen her at church. At the grocery store. At funerals. He had nodded. She had nodded back.
She did not see him now. She went to the first table and began.
She judged the way she had taught home economics for thirty-five years. Slowly. Fairly. Without fuss. She looked at each pie. She cut a small slice. She tasted it. She took a sip of water. She wrote on the scorecard. She read the name card, if there was one, and sometimes smiled.
It took her an hour and a half to get to the last table.
She cut into the perfect peach pie with the crimped crust and tasted it and wrote a long time on the card.
Then she turned to the paper plate beside it.
Entry number fifty-two.
Vern stopped breathing.
Arlene Hupp looked down at the broken cherry pie for a long moment. At the collapsed lattice. At the broken side of the crust. At the dark red juice puddled on the paper plate.
There was a little murmur in the crowd.
She did not cut a slice. There was nothing left whole enough to cut. She took a clean spoon from her apron pocket and took a spoonful of cherries and crust from the middle, and tasted it, slowly.
Then she reached for the name card.
She read it.
Vern watched her read it.
He watched her go perfectly still, the way people go still when they hear a song they have not heard since they were young.
Homecoming, 1967. Eleven dollars.
Arlene Hupp stood at the end of the last table for a long time with the card in her hand.
Then she looked up, slowly, and out across the folding chairs, row by row, until she found the back row.
She found him.
Vern sat there in his dusty shirt with his scraped hands in his lap. He did not look away this time. It took everything he had. But he did not look away.
Arlene looked at him for a long moment across the exhibit hall. Then she picked up her pen and wrote on the scorecard. Not very much. Just a few words.
She clipped the card to the paper plate and moved on.
Vern did not place. Of course he did not. The blue ribbon went to the perfect peach pie. A woman from Lutz Hollow Road won second with a pecan. Vern was not even in the top ten.
He did not care.
When the judging was over and the crowd was drifting out, Dot went up to the last table and took the scorecard off the paper plate for him, because his knee would not let him get up.
She brought it back and put it in his hand without reading it.
Vern put on his reading glasses.
Entry 52. Cherry, lattice.
Appearance: 2.
Crust: 6.
Filling: 8.
Nerve: 10.
And under that, in Arlene Hupp's neat home economics teacher's handwriting, five more words.
Yes. Saturday. Six o'clock. Dot's.
Floyd Eckert, reading over his shoulder, slapped his knee and laughed so loud that people turned around in the doorway.
Dot did not laugh. She put her hand on Vern's arm and looked at him over her glasses, and her eyes were wet.
"Saturday at six," she said. "At my diner." She sniffed. "I'll save you the corner booth, hon. And I'll make a cherry pie."
"No," Vern said.
He folded the scorecard and put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart.
"I'll make it," he said.