Pie Read online

  Alice had known Charlie for most of her life, but they weren’t friends. Like Nora Needleman, he’d been in her class at school that year. Charlie was tall for his age and skinny. He had gigantic feet and bright orange hair that he wore in a flattop, the sides clipped so close to his head you could see the pinkness of his scalp showing through. Polly Portman had hired Charlie from time to time to do odd jobs, like emptying the trash or toting groceries home from the store. As Alice studied his fingernails, each with a little crescent of black grease wedged beneath it, she found herself wondering if anyone in the Erdling household had ever heard of soap and a fingernail brush.

  When Reverend Flowers finally stepped down from the pulpit, Charlie poked Alice in the ribs with a pointy elbow and jerked his thumb toward the front of the church, where Polly’s coffin sat with the lid propped open.

  “You gonna pay your respects to your auntie now?” he asked.

  Alice shuddered. The last thing she wanted to do was look at Aunt Polly’s body lying stiff and cold in that long wooden box. She hoped her aunt’s spirit was far away, happily baking pies for a bunch of hungry angels up in heaven.

  “You go ahead, if you want,” Alice said, slumping down in her seat. “I think I’ll sit here for a while.”

  Alice’s parents paid their respects first, followed by Mayor Needleman, whose wife managed to orchestrate things so that the mayor would be the one to take Alice’s mother’s arm and lead her up the aisle while the photographer from The Ipsy News snapped pictures for the paper. The mayor was running for reelection, and his wife, who also happened to be his campaign manager, knew a good photo opportunity when she saw one. Only the week before, the mayor had posed for a picture with Polly in the pie shop, for an article that was to appear in LIFE magazine. Alice had learned this not from her aunt Polly, who was modest about such things, but from the mayor’s wife, whom Alice and her mother had run into at the grocery store in the frozen-food aisle one day.

  “Did you hear about it, Ruth?” Mrs. Needleman had bragged. “LIFE magazine. With the election coming up in November … well, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Henry of course didn’t even want to do the interview — he hates talking to reporters almost as much as he hates giving speeches — but I told him only a fool would turn down that kind of publicity. You know what they say: One minute the mayor’s office, the next minute the Oval Office! President Needleman does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  Alice’s mother was not a big fan of Melanie Needleman, whom she found self-centered and too tightly wound. As Mayor Needleman led Alice’s mother up the aisle of the church after the funeral, his wife followed a few steps behind him, brushing dandruff flakes off his shoulders in between the bursts of flashbulbs. Mrs. Needleman was so concerned with the task at hand that she didn’t notice the elderly white-haired woman in a black veil attempting to get past her. Finally the woman, leaning heavily on her cane, tapped Mrs. Needleman on the shoulder with a gloved hand.

  “Do you mind, dearie?” she croaked. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  Melanie Needleman stepped to one side and let the woman pass, then she returned her attention to her husband’s dandruff. A few minutes later, a big green Chevrolet pulled out of the church parking lot and drove off in the direction of the pie shop.

  Alice didn’t feel like going outside, where she’d have to listen to a bunch of people blubbering about how much they were going to miss her aunt Polly and her pies. Nobody was going to miss Polly as much as Alice would. There were still plenty of people left in the church paying their respects. Dressed in black, making their way single file down the aisle, they reminded Alice of a trail of ants. Looking down, she saw that her shoe had come undone and bent to tie it, making a double knot this time to be sure that it held. When she sat back up, she noticed a tall woman in a voluminous black dress looming over her aunt’s open casket. The woman wore a large ring on the second finger of her right hand that sparkled and flashed in the sunlight filtering into the church through the high arched windows above. Even though Alice couldn’t see her face, she knew who it was right away. Miss Gurke, the principal from her school, always dressed that way, in clothes so loose you could have fit a second person inside and still had room to spare.

  Alice was afraid of Miss Gurke. In addition to the strange way she dressed, there was an oily glistening quality to her skin that reminded Alice of a snake. Miss Gurke’s pet peeve was tardiness. She would stand inside the front door, grabbing kids by the hoods of their jackets and frog-marching them straight down to her office if they arrived so much as a second after the bell had rung. Since kindergarten, Alice had always made it a point to get to school at least fifteen minutes early.

  As Alice watched from her seat in the pew, Miss Gurke bowed her head, resting both hands on the edge of the casket. When she had finished paying her respects, she did something curious. Instead of turning away, she leaned over the casket and slipped her hand into it, almost as if she intended to lift Polly’s head up and kiss her good-bye. She must have reconsidered, Alice decided, because Miss Gurke quickly jerked her hand back out and walked away, hurrying up the aisle and out of the church without looking back.

  Alice stayed until the whole place had emptied out and the last of the mourners had left. It was peaceful then, and quiet, a perfect time to reflect on the many special moments she and her aunt Polly had shared together.

  She recalled a time she’d stopped by the pie shop on her way home from school one day and found her aunt squeezing lemons for a batch of lemon chess pies.

  “Can I go fishing?” asked Alice, happily hopping up on the red stool.

  Polly finished squeezing the last of the lemons and passed the bowl to Alice. Then she handed her a fork.

  “Fish away,” she told her.

  “Mom says you could be a millionaire if you wanted to be,” Alice said as she began to fish out the slippery white lemon seeds with the fork and drop them into the little dish her aunt had placed on the counter beside her. “Don’t you want to be rich?”

  “I’m already rich in all the ways that count,” said Polly. “And so is your mother, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

  “If you say so,” said Alice, “but I hope you’ve got that recipe locked up someplace safe.”

  “Don’t worry.” Polly smiled and tapped the side of her head. “I’ve got it right here.”

  While she waited for Alice to finish, Polly absentmindedly fiddled with the brass key that hung on a chain around her neck. She was forever doing that, tucking the key into the top of her blouse or tugging on it while she was talking. Alice loved the way it would sometimes dangle down and twirl, catching in the light as her aunt slipped a pie into the glowing oven. It was the only key to the pie shop door and Polly always wore it around her neck for safekeeping.

  When the last of the seeds had been removed from the lemon juice, Polly sent Alice to the pantry to get some sugar, while she went and fetched the basket of fresh brown eggs someone had left on the doorstep that morning.

  “If I ask you something, do you promise you’ll give me an honest answer, Aunt Polly?” Alice asked, resting her elbows on the counter while she watched her aunt carefully rinse off the eggs.

  “Of course,” Polly told her. “Ask me anything.”

  “Do I have an active imagination?”

  “Absolutely,” Polly said, cracking an egg smartly against the rim of a bowl.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Alice with a sigh.

  “What do you mean?” Polly asked. “An active imagination is a wonderful thing to have.”

  “Mom doesn’t think so,” Alice confided. “She thinks it’s annoying.”

  “Pish posh,” Polly said, tossing aside the empty shell and grabbing another egg.

  “Sometimes I make up little songs,” said Alice. “Mom says that’s especially annoying.”

  Polly got a faraway look in her eyes. “Your mother used to sing all the time when she was a little girl. Sh
e had the voice of an angel.”

  “Really?” Alice couldn’t remember ever having heard her mother sing.

  “It was a joy to listen to her,” said Polly.

  “Mom says I’m tone-deaf,” Alice said.

  “Join the crowd.” Polly laughed sympathetically. “I couldn’t tell the difference between flat and sharp if my life depended upon it. So how about singing me one of your little songs?”

  “Right now?” Alice asked.

  Polly nodded, so Alice jumped off the red stool, cleared her throat, and sang a song she made up right on the spot.

  Aunt Polly’s pies are hot and round,

  Eat ‘em in a chair or sittin’ on the ground,

  Huckleberry, blackberry, peach, and prune,

  Eat ‘em with a fork or eat ‘em with a spoon.

  When Alice had finished singing, Polly threw her arms around her.

  “Bravo!” she cried.

  “I’ve never heard of a prune pie,” Alice told her. “But sometimes you have to stick strange things into songs to get the rhymes to work.”

  “I loved it,” Polly said. “Prunes and all. And I love you, too, Alice.”

  “I wish I could sing better,” Alice said.

  “It’s important to be grateful for the gifts we have,” Polly told her. “You are a wonderful songwriter. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  Alice felt all warm and gooey inside, like one of her aunt Polly’s pies. She wanted to stay there in the pie shop forever. Aunt Polly was the only other person Alice knew who liked cream cheese and olive sandwiches. That’s what they had for lunch the day Polly died. It was a Friday in the middle of July, school was out, and Alice had come over to the shop to help her aunt string a bushel of rhubarb for rhubarb pie. At noon they took a break and ate their sandwiches upstairs, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. Then Polly said she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to lie down for a bit. Alice covered her with the leopard-print quilt that lay folded on the foot of the bed, and as she bent to kiss her aunt’s smooth cheek, Polly Portman whispered those final words, “Thank you very much.” By morning she was gone.

  • • •

  Alice wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there alone in the church thinking about her aunt Polly, but when she stood up, she found that her left foot had gone to sleep, so she jiggled it a little to wake it up. She had every intention of going outside to find her parents, but for some strange reason, her feet carried her down the aisle and deposited her right in front of her aunt’s open casket instead. She had to admit, they’d done a good job of fixing her up. Her hair was curled and she had on a nice shade of pink lipstick. But as Alice stood there gazing down at her aunt Polly, she got the strangest feeling inside. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something was not right.

  BUTTERMILK PIE

  1 9-inch pie tin, lined with unbaked piecrust

  3 large eggs

  ¾ cup sugar

  3 TBS flour

  1½ cups low-fat buttermilk

  1 tsp vanilla

  3 TBS fresh lemon juice

  1 tsp grated lemon rind

  1 tsp butter, melted

  ½ tsp ground nutmeg

  Preheat oven to 350. Cover unbaked pie shell with parchment paper or a coffee filter. Press down to fit and toss in a handful of dried beans. Place weighted shell in preheated oven and bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and empty out beans. Discard parchment and set pastry shell aside.

  Raise oven to 375. Beat eggs and sugar until light and lemony colored. Add flour and beat until well mixed. Add buttermilk, vanilla, lemon juice, lemon rind, and butter. Pour into baked crust and dust with nutmeg. Bake in preheated 375-degree oven for 25-30 minutes. Cool slightly on wire rack before serving.

  Reminder: Doris Kaperfew’s favorite. (Birthday: August 12)

  Chapter Three

  There were a couple of surprising things about Polly Portman’s will. The first was that she left the pie shop and all of its contents to Reverend Flowers, with instructions that he was to use it in whatever way he chose to help raise funds for the church. Alice’s mother was fit to be tied.

  “She’s thumbing her nose at us even from the grave,” she shouted angrily. “We’re family. By all rights the pie shop should be ours.”

  Her dark mood quickly lifted, however, when Polly’s lawyer, Mr. Ogden, called the house.

  “He’s asked to speak to you, Alice,” Alice’s father said, handing her the phone.

  Mrs. Anderson could barely contain herself, breathing down Alice’s neck and whispering instructions into her free ear as she strained to hear what Mr. Ogden was saying on the other end of the line. By the time Alice hung up, her mother was practically beside herself.

  “What did he say?” she cried. “Is it good news? Tell us everything.”

  “He wants me to come down to his office,” Alice said.

  “And?” her mother urged, eyes gleaming.

  “He said Aunt Polly left me something in her will and that I should come as soon as possible to get it.”

  “Did you hear that, George?” Alice’s mother said excitedly. “I’ll just run upstairs and put on some lipstick.”

  “He wants me to come alone, Mom,” Alice said.

  “Oh,” said Alice’s mother.

  “Did he say anything else?” her father asked, and Alice could tell by the little pink spots on his cheeks that he was starting to get excited now, too.

  “Well, it was kind of hard to hear, ‘cause Mom was talking to me at the same time, but I know it has something to do with Aunt Polly’s piecrust recipe.”

  “Great merciful heavens!” Alice’s mother exclaimed, clapping both hands to her cheeks. “Do you realize what this means? Polly has finally set things right. She’s left you the recipe! We’ll sell it to the highest bidder and kiss all our cares good-bye.” Tears of joy filled her eyes as she threw back her head and shouted, “We’re going to be rich!”

  Alice’s father just kept shaking his head and saying, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

  For many years, Alice’s father had worked for the Hoover Company, peddling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. It was not the job of his dreams, so when PIE began to attract tourists to Ipswitch, he heard the sound of opportunity knocking. With Polly’s blessing, he set up a souvenir stand next to the shop, where he sold key chains shaped like rolling pins, leopard-print pot holders, and aprons with a picture of Polly’s smiling face embroidered on the front and the slogan, “Hey, Polly, what’s your secret?” stitched beneath it.

  It was the question everybody asked, and the answer nobody knew: the secret to Polly Portman’s perfect piecrust.

  “It’s by far the flakiest!”

  “Ever so crisp!”

  “Light as a feather!”

  Anyone who doubted this high praise had only to look under Polly’s bed. That’s where she kept her Blueberry medals.

  “Aunt Polly, how come you keep your medals under the bed?” Alice had asked one day.

  “I keep them under the bed so I won’t have to look at them,” Polly said.

  “Why don’t you want to look at them?”

  “I’m afraid I might get a swelled head,” she said with a wink. “And then I wouldn’t be able to wear my favorite hat anymore.”

  Polly’s favorite hat was a leopard-print cloche she’d purchased from the Sears catalogue the year she won her first Blueberry Award. The Blueberry Award was established in 1922 to celebrate the most distinguished contribution to American pie making. Each year during the month of August, people from all over the country would box up their pies and deliver them to the Blueberry committee for consideration. The committee members would carefully evaluate the pies, “Blueberry Buzz” would spread as the top contenders emerged, “Mock Blueberry” clubs would choose their own favorites, and finally on the first Monday in September, amid a great deal of fanfare, the Blueberry committee would announce the winner. Polly had never considered entering the contes
t. She baked because it made her happy, and as far as she was concerned, that was reward enough.

  Then, early one August morning, a woman from St. Petersburg, Florida, by the name of Harriet Melcher arrived in Ipswitch carrying a five-pound coconut in her purse. Later that same day, she boarded the train back to St. Petersburg holding a cardboard box containing half a coconut cream pie. She’d eaten the other half earlier in the day and her hands were still shaking with excitement.

  Polly would never have entered one of her pies in the contest herself, but Harriet Melcher happened to be on the Blueberry committee that year and, after tasting Polly’s coconut cream pie, she took the liberty of bringing it — or what was left of it — to the committee herself. This is how it came to pass that at six o’clock in the morning on Monday, September 7, 1942, Polly Portman received a phone call. The excited voice on the other end of the line belonged to Harriet Melcher.

  “Good morning, Miss Portman! On behalf of the committee, I am pleased to inform you that you’ve just been awarded the 1942 Blueberry medal for your outstanding coconut cream pie. We look forward to seeing you at the award ceremony.”

  Polly was delighted that the committee had enjoyed her pie, but the idea of winning a prize for it made her feel very uncomfortable, so much so that she tried to turn it down.

  “The Blueberry is the most coveted award in the field of pie baking, Miss Portman. You have no idea how many people would kill to be in your shoes,” Harriet Melcher told her.

  “What an awful thought!” Polly exclaimed.

  “The ceremony is in Philadelphia this year — just a hop, skip, and a jump away from you. Everyone will be so disappointed if you don’t come.”

  Not wanting to seem ungrateful, Polly finally agreed to accept the award and to attend the ceremony in Philadelphia. She even ordered herself a new hat from Sears. A few weeks later, she wore the leopard-print cloche to the American Pie Makers Association conference, where she delivered a heartfelt four-word acceptance speech — “Thank you very much.”