Vern Ostrander had never baked a pie in his life when he walked into Dot's Corner Diner on a Tuesday in July and asked Dot Kessler to teach him, and when she asked him why, he turned red to the top of his bald head and said, "Because Arlene Hupp is judging the pies at the county fair."
Dot put down the coffeepot.
She looked at him over her glasses for a long time.
"Vern," she said. "You're eighty years old."
"I know how old I am, Dot."
"Arlene Hupp," Dot said slowly. "Arlene Hupp who taught home economics at the high school for thirty-five years. Arlene Hupp who has judged pies at the Calder County Fair since 1986. That Arlene Hupp."
"Yes."
Dot leaned on the counter.
"Hon," she said. "Sit down. This is going to take a while."
Vern was a quiet man. He had worked on the furnace floor at the Calder Glass Works for twenty-two years, from 1964 until it closed in 1986, and then he had driven a county snowplow for twenty more. He had been married to a kind, practical woman named Edna for fifty-one years. She had died in 2021.
He lived alone now in a small white house on Maple Street. He ate breakfast at Dot's three mornings a week. He sat at the end of the counter, not at the Liars' Table.
He had certainly never been much for talking to Arlene Hupp.
"Tell me," Dot said, pouring him a coffee.
Vern looked at the coffee for a long time.
"August of 1967," he said finally. "The county fair. I was twenty-one. Arlene was eighteen. She was going to college in Athens in the fall."
"I remember Arlene at eighteen," Dot said. "I was twelve. I thought she was a movie star."
"She won the junior pie contest that year," Vern said. "Cherry. Lattice top. They auctioned off the winning pies after, for the 4-H. I'd never bid on anything in my life." He turned the coffee cup in his hands. "I bought her pie for eleven dollars. The most anybody paid for a pie that whole fair."
"And then?"
"And then she came over to thank me," Vern said. "And she stood right in front of me with that red ribbon on her dress and said, Thank you, Vern, that was awful sweet. And I'd been planning all afternoon to ask her to the Panthers homecoming dance in October." He shook his head. "And I didn't say a single word. I just stood there holding the pie. She waited a minute. Then she went back to her mother."
He looked up at Dot.
"She went to Athens in September. She married a fellow from Marietta. I married Edna. Edna was a good wife. I never regretted it a day." He paused. "But I've thought about that pie for fifty-nine years."
Dot was quiet for a while.
"Arlene's husband passed in 2019," she said finally.
"I know it."
"And Edna's been gone five years."
"I know that too."
"So why not just ask her to supper, Vern? Like a normal person?"
Vern looked at her as if she had suggested he jump off the water tower.
"Dot," he said, "I couldn't ask her to a dance when I was twenty-one. I'm not going to be able to ask her to supper at eighty." He set down the cup. "But if I bake a pie, she has to taste it. She's the judge. And I'll put something on it so she knows it's me."
Dot stared at him.
Then she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the stool behind the counter.
"Vern Ostrander," she said, wiping her eyes. "That is the dumbest, sweetest thing I have heard in forty-eight years of running this diner." She stood up and untied her apron. "Come back Thursday at two. Bring a rolling pin."
"I don't have a rolling pin."
"Lord help us," Dot said.
The county fair was the third week of August. That gave them five weeks.
Vern came to the diner kitchen every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at two o'clock. Dot taught him on her 1978 gas range, which she lit with a match.
She taught him how to cut cold butter into flour with two knives until it looked like coarse meal. How to add the ice water a spoonful at a time. How to roll it out from the middle toward the edges.
He was terrible at it.
His first crust fell apart. His second crust was so tough Dot said she could resole her shoes with it. Floyd Eckert from the Liars' Table wandered back into the kitchen on the second Thursday, looked at the mess, and said, "Vern, what in God's name are you doing?"
"Baking," Vern said.
"Why?"
"None of your business, Floyd."
By that afternoon, the whole Liars' Table knew. By the next morning, half of Pine Hollow did.
"What kind of pie?" Dot asked, in the third week.
"Cherry," Vern said. "Lattice top."
Dot looked at him over her glasses.
"Vern, a lattice top is the hardest thing there is. You can barely make a crust."
"It has to be cherry," Vern said. "With a lattice."
Dot looked at him for a moment longer. Then she sighed and got out the sour cherries.
By the fifth week, his crusts were holding together. His lattice was crooked, but it was a lattice. His filling was a little runny, but it tasted like cherries.
"It's not going to win, Vern," Dot said gently, on the last Thursday. "You know that. Arlene's been judging forty years."
"I don't need to win," Vern said. "I need her to taste it."
"And how's she going to know it's yours?"
Vern took a folded sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her.
It was the entry form for the Calder County Fair Open Class Pie Contest. Name. Address. Category. And at the bottom, a line that said: Name of Pie (optional).
Vern had filled it in, in his careful, square printing.
Homecoming, 1967. Eleven dollars.
Dot read it. She did not say anything for a long time.
"She'll know," she said finally, very softly.
On the morning of the fair, Vern got up at four o'clock and baked the pie in his own kitchen, It was the best one he had ever made. The lattice was almost straight. The cherries were bubbling up through it, dark red.
He put it in a cardboard pie box Dot had given him. He put on a clean shirt and drove to the Calder County Fairgrounds with the box on the passenger seat beside him, belted in.
Pie entries closed at nine o'clock sharp.
He parked in the gravel lot at eight-thirty-five. He went around to the passenger side and lifted out the pie box very carefully, with both hands.
He took three steps across the gravel toward the exhibit hall.
Then his left foot came down on a loose rock, and his bad knee went out from under him, and Vern went down hard on the gravel, and the pie box flew out of his hands.