The blue ribbon went to a sour cream raisin pie, and Dot knew it was hers before she tasted it.
She knew it from across the exhibit hall. The color of the custard, a deep warm tan.
The raisins plump and dark, sunk evenly through it. The meringue piled high and browned at the peaks the way you only get by pulling it at exactly the right second.
Dot Kessler had been baking that pie every Tuesday since 1978. She knew it the way she knew her own face in the mirror.
"Well, hon," said Ruth Ann, standing beside her. "Somebody's been reading over your shoulder."
The Calder County Maple Festival was held the last weekend of March at the fairgrounds, when the sap ran and the sugar shacks in the hills sent up their steam. There was a pancake breakfast, a maple syrup contest, a quilt raffle, and a pie contest that Dot had entered every year for thirty-one years.
She'd won it twenty-two times. The Liars' Table kept count. Floyd Eckert said it was the only reliable statistic in Calder County.
This year, her pie sat on the long table with a red ribbon. Second place.
The blue ribbon sat on a pie entered by a woman Dot had never seen before. The entry card said Renee Moore, Columbus. And underneath, in neat handwriting: My grandmother's recipe.
"It's good, Dot," said Joan Albaugh, who'd been judging the pie contest for the county extension office since 2004. She had the decency to look a little uncomfortable. "It's very good. The crust was just a hair flakier than yours. That's all it came down to."
"Can I taste it?"
Joan cut her a sliver.
Dot tasted it. She closed her eyes.
It was her pie. The custard with a little nutmeg and a little cinnamon and no more. The raisins simmered first, so they were soft but didn't burst.
A pinch of salt in the meringue, which Dot had never once seen another baker do. And the crust, short and tender and flaky, breaking into layers on her tongue.
Dot opened her eyes and found Ruth Ann watching her.
"Well?" Ruth Ann said quietly.
"It's mine," Dot said.
The pie had been her mother's first.
Hazel Frye had baked it every Sunday in the farmhouse on Lutz Hollow Road, and Dot had learned it standing on a kitchen chair at her elbow, watching her mother's hands. Hazel never measured anything. She died in the spring of 1977, a year before Dot opened the diner, and Dot had baked the pie every Tuesday since, partly to keep from forgetting her.
In all those years, she'd owned exactly one thing written in her mother's hand about that pie. And she'd given it away a long time ago.
The woman came back to the table at two o'clock to collect her ribbon.
She was about forty-five, tall, with short dark hair and kind brown eyes that looked tired. She wore a fleece jacket and jeans. When she saw the blue ribbon on her pie, she pressed her hand to her mouth and laughed, a little shaky, like she couldn't quite believe it.
Then she saw Dot standing there with the red ribbon, and something crossed her face that Dot couldn't read.
"Congratulations, hon," Dot said. She held out her hand. "Dot Kessler. I run the diner in Pine Hollow."
"I had breakfast at your diner this morning." The woman shook her hand. Her grip was strong, a baker's grip. "Renee Moore. Your pie was beautiful."
"Yours was better. Joan says the crust." Dot smiled, but she kept hold of the woman's hand a second longer than usual. "That's a family recipe, the card says?"
"My grandmother's." Renee's chin came up a little. "I know what you're thinking. Folks have been looking at me funny all afternoon. Somebody told me sour cream raisin is your pie. I didn't know that when I entered. I swear I didn't."
"I'm not thinking anything, hon. I'm just curious."
Renee hesitated. Then she reached into her purse and took out a plastic sleeve, the kind you'd keep an important paper in.
"I brought the card," she said. "In case anybody asked."
She held it out. Dot didn't take it at first.
It was an old index card, gone the color of weak tea, soft at the corners from handling. Stained in one corner with something that might have been butter, sixty years ago. The writing on it was in blue fountain pen ink, faded, in a slanting, looping hand with big generous capitals.
Sour Cream Raisin Pie. 1 cup raisins, simmer 10 min. 1 cup sour cream.
3 egg yolks. A pinch of salt in the whites, don't forget.
And at the bottom, underlined twice: Hazel. March 1961.
Ruth Ann, reading over Dot's shoulder, did the arithmetic out loud without meaning to.
"1961," she said. "That's seventeen years before you opened the diner, Dot."
Dot didn't answer.
She was staring at the card. At the slant of the letters, the big generous loop on the capital H, the way the writer crossed her t's with a little upward flick, like a bird taking off.
She'd seen that hand on her school permission slips. On her birthday cards. On the grocery lists stuck to the refrigerator of the farmhouse on Lutz Hollow Road, every week of her childhood.
Dot's knees went a little weak. She put one hand on the edge of the pie table.
It was her mother's handwriting.