Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  “From my grandma,” he beamed. He took his ribbon and found his mom in the audience who had the grandma on the other end of the cell phone, waiting to hear the news from her pie protégé.

  The days ticked by in a busy, pie-gorging blur. I had barely thought about Marcus, or at least not about the anniversary I was dreading, which was in just a few more days. I had made the right, strategic choice in coming to Iowa; the state fair was the Ultimate Distraction Zone. I had just a few more contests to go, enough to make me confess something I had hoped never to say: I was getting tired of eating pie.

  CHAPTER

  20

  The day I was dreading had to come eventually—August 19. It was the day I had planned my entire trip to Iowa around; the avoidance of it was my reason for coming to the state fair. By chance, the nineteenth was one of the few days when no pie contest took place. Chance? Yeah, right. The grief gods were letting me take this game of evasion only so far.

  I woke up at 8:03 a.m. The sun was shining, the humidity high, the heat penetrated the fields of growing corn as I lay in bed, snuggling with Team Terrier, one dog’s belly under each hand. With my head still on the pillow, I watched the digital clock on the bedside table as the numbers ticked by until they reached 8:36 a.m.—6:36 a.m. Pacific time—the time that exactly one year ago was stamped on Marcus’s hospital report. The number was printed right there in black ink, next to the words Pronounced Dead.

  I hated knowing the time down to the exact minute. I hated knowing the date, too, as the nineteenth of every month will always remind me of losing Marcus. Most of all, I hated that Marcus was gone.

  My one-year grace period of grief was officially over. One whole year. Reaching the one-year mark of Marcus’s passing was not like crossing the finish line of a marathon, where all that hard work and strenuous effort was magically, instantly, behind me. No one was handing me a shiny medal or taking a victory shot with my winning time displayed in the background. There was no finish line for grief. What I could see, as I lay there in bed, watching the clock, was that grief was a lifelong marathon, the training would never end. I would just have to continue building up really, really strong muscles over time.

  I stayed in bed as the digital numbers moved toward nine o’clock. I was still aware that even without a medal or a souvenir photo or a Spurs Award, I had accomplished something really big in the past twelve months. I had never been in a race like this one. I had wanted to quit—really quit—many times. If not for Susan’s counseling, and my two dogs who depended on me, I’m not sure I would have made it through those first few months. But there I was, in Des Moines, Iowa, in the guest room of a high school friend, lying in bed, staring at the clock. I was alive. I was healthy. And I had to figure out how I was going to spend this day.

  I got dressed and, after walking the dogs and making coffee, I did something I never do: I went to church. I drove downtown to the St. Ambrose Cathedral. I wasn’t seeking religion. I had already tried that. I merely wanted to go somewhere to symbolize my lost love with burning light. And I knew Catholic churches always guaranteed a ready supply of candles.

  I left the bright and hot outdoors and entered the quiet church, stopping for a minute to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I felt the coolness of marble and stone on my skin, and inhaled the incense that evoked a latent memory of attending Sunday mass with my family. I wandered around the back of the cathedral until I found several religious shrines with rows of votive candles burning in front of them. I chose the statue of Mary as Marcus’s anniversary shrine. Mary was holding her baby, and babies represented the circle of life. People are born, people live, people die, new people are born. We all fit into this cycle. It’s just that some, like Marcus—or one of Patti’s triplets or Kathy Eldon’s son Dan—died sooner than we could ever dream.

  I lit a candle and said a prayer of gratitude. “Thank you for the time I had with Marcus,” adding, as if backpedaling on the compliment, “even if it was cut short.” I still missed Marcus, still loved him, still grieved him, but I had made the choice to keep living, to thrive and to eat pie.

  I wiped a few tears away and reminded myself that Marcus would want me to keep going. And he would like having candles lit in his honor. After watching the candle burn for a few minutes, its flame flickering among the fifty or so other lit candles, I slid a five-dollar bill in the collection box and left.

  I received many phone calls during the day. Joerg called from Portland, then Alison, Nan, Melissa and, later, my mom. Each phone call produced a few more tears. I was touched by everyone’s kindness—and more than appreciating their care for me, I appreciated their acknowledgment of Marcus. The biggest gift to me was that they remembered him. I didn’t want anyone to forget him. I wouldn’t let them forget. I was his conduit, the keeper of the Marcus flame. It’s the least I could do for him.

  I went for a long sweaty walk with the dogs that afternoon, and that evening I went out with Meg and some of her girlfriends for drinks at a bar in the suburbs. I ordered a martini. I wasn’t feeling dangerous. I wasn’t feeling self-destructive. There was certainly no possibility of a one-night stand on the horizon. I ordered a martini simply because I felt like having one. In between the small talk with the girls, I made a silent toast to Marcus. “Here’s to you, my love. I miss you.”

  And that was my day. Except for watching the clock in the morning, I didn’t spend too much time reliving every detail of that harrowing day and the following ones. I had chosen to spend this dark anniversary in a light place. I had driven 1,700 miles to be in Iowa, to be surrounded by old friends and familiar scenery, to be nurtured by the pastoral landscape and its wide-open horizons, to be—in a word—home.

  The anniversary wasn’t as bad as I expected. It was even slightly anticlimactic. Really. Was all that anticipation for nothing? Or was I starting to heal?

  CHAPTER

  21

  This is what my life had come to: grieving widow uproots herself from the security of her Portland home to travel across country in her MINI Cooper with two dogs and a bin of pie-baking supplies and in the midst of judging pies at the Iowa State Fair ends up at the Des Moines, Iowa, headquarters for Better Homes and Gardens magazine to have her photo taken for the November issue. How did I end up here?

  The Better Homes and Gardens’s assistant deputy editor, Kelly Kegans, is how. Kelly had found my blog and wanted to mention it in the magazine. She had contacted me when I was still living in Portland and when I realized I was going to be in Iowa a few months later, I let her know. At which point she asked if I would come to their offices and give one of my pie-baking classes. And, as long as I was there, have my photo taken for the magazine.

  Yeah, okay.

  But when I said yes, I didn’t plan on the shoot taking place the day after Marcus’s one-year D-day anniversary. My eyes weren’t as puffy these past few weeks as I hadn’t been crying as often, but I did plenty of sobbing on the anniversary. Every time I got a sympathy call or a condolence email, my eyes welled up again, until they were back to their “new normal” swollen size. Not to mention, I didn’t sleep very well after having that martini followed by a few glasses of wine.

  It was with these freshly swollen eyes I entered the sleek offices of Meredith Publishing. I signed in at the reception desk and was provided with a trolley for carting my pie supplies down a long corridor to the test kitchen where both the pie class and the photo shoot would take place.

  If everything leading up to being here wasn’t unfathomable enough, standing in the test kitchen at this legendary publishing company really made me shake my head in disbelief. Immaculate and new, this was the kind of million-dollar designer kitchen you see only in magazines. With the long granite countertops perfect for rolling dough, stainless steel appliances, recessed lighting and an entire wall of windows, it was also a pie maker’s dream. But it wasn’t the physical kitchen space that impressed me; it was the fact that my mother’s banana cream pie recipe originated here. Not in this
modern, updated kitchen, of course, but in this building, under this roof. Des Moines, Iowa, was where the red-and-white-checkered cookbook was written and all the recipes in it tested more than fifty years ago. And now I was going to be teaching people who worked here how to make apple pie? Really, life was getting stranger by the minute.

  First things first. A makeup artist was on hand to transform my casual, rather ragged appearance into something worthy of a national glossy magazine. Yeah, good luck with that.

  Kelly, a fiery red head with curly locks cascading off her shoulders, sat nearby and watched (simultaneously keeping up with her workload by using her iPhone) while Mary-Kate, the professional makeup artist, applied copious amounts of foundation, concealer, eye shadow and blush to my face. This was all unnatural enough for my plain taste, but when Mary-Kate pulled out little containers of tiny fake hair—false eyelashes, to be applied in individual clumps—I had to stop myself from bolting from the chair. I looked over at Kelly, feigning agony, and mouthed the words “What the…?!” She laughed—though I detected a trace of empathy.

  Mary-Kate said, “Don’t worry. You will look perfectly natural in the photos. Even Gayle gets false eyelashes for her picture.” The Gayle she was referring to was the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Gayle Butler. I had seen Gayle’s picture and indeed there was no trace of stagelike makeup or false eyelashes. In fact, she looked fresh-faced and beautiful.

  “Okay,” I relented. “If Gayle does it, then fine.”

  After she glued on the lashes, I blinked my eyes rapidly and hummed the “I Dream of Jeannie” theme song. I’m not sure if Mary-Kate appreciated my joke, but she tolerated my intolerance of her craft. In the scheme of things, I could at least admit that getting my hair and makeup done for the magazine shoot wasn’t nearly as bad as my stress over having it done for the TV show pitch meeting.

  I have always prided myself on how I’ve lived my life “naturally,” as an athlete, camp counselor—and one summer as a wilderness ranger. My sister, the soap-opera star, was always the glamorous one. I rarely wore makeup and, with the exception of hosting the inline-skating show, I didn’t seek out media attention. My career was focused on getting other people in front of the camera. It was ironic that at a time I looked my worst, I was finding myself more and more frequently with a lens pointed at me or making public appearances. I could only surmise it was a good thing. For one, I was forced to smile. My dad, the dentist, always told me, “It takes twenty-seven less muscles to smile than to frown.” I could stand to save energy and do more smiling. Even if I had to be an actress. If I acted happy enough, healed enough, maybe I would convince not just an audience but myself that I was okay.

  The plan of the day was to do the photo shoot with me first, then have me give a pie-baking lesson for the BH&G editors in the test kitchen. But life—whether in the magazine world or otherwise—rarely goes according to plan. After the makeup was applied and the shine on my forehead doused with an extra brush of powder, the photographer did not show up as scheduled. He was delayed by a high-maintenance super model he was shooting for the cover, some brown-skinned bird who took longer in the oven than expected. The magazine editors began filing into the test kitchen, ready to make pie. So that’s what we did. We made pie.

  I shouldn’t have been wearing the purple long-sleeved sweater I brought for the photo shoot during my pie class—I never make dough with long sleeves—but with no time to change clothes, I jumped right into instruction mode.

  “First measure two and a half cups of flour into the bowl, then add a stick of butter,” I began. I ran up and down the long kitchen counter, supervising the dough mixing of eight magazine staffers. “This is not bread!” I reminded them. “If you feel the urge to knead, then don’t make pie, make cinnamon rolls.”

  One of the editors, who was known to her fellow staff as “quite the wordsmith,” said, “It’s like you want to fluff the dough.”

  “Yes, fluff. That’s a great word. I’m going to use that from now on,” I told her. She nodded and kept…well, fluffing.

  One “student” was working her dough so hard she was strangling it. I could see the innocent flour and fat struggling to resist her heavy handedness and, like a battered child, build up an irreversible toughness. I gave her a stern reprimand. “Take. Your. Hands. Out. Of. The. Dough. Now.” I found out later she was one of the chief bakers in the test kitchen. I said to Kelly later, “Why didn’t you tell me? I am so embarrassed.”

  “I didn’t know, either,” she said.

  I got a stern reprimand of my own when Mary-Kate came over and looked at my face. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Look at you,” she said, shaking her head. I was a melted mess, mascara was running off my eyes, and my face was so sweaty and shiny (from all that supervising and sticking my head in the oven) you could see your reflection in it. She came back with her giant powder brush to touch up my nose and forehead, and then brought over her lint roller to get all the flour off my sweater.

  At last the photographer and art director arrived on the scene and the shoot began. They had me peel apples, but when the photographer asked me to look at the camera and not at the apple while holding a knife in my hand and peeling, I once again shot a look at Kelly. “Hey, when I signed that photo-release form, did that also include a release of liability for any injury caused by my paring knife?”

  The shoot went fine—I smiled on cue, I peeled ten apples and the pies from the class all turned out looking so picture perfect they were used in the photo shoot. The pies were so pretty, brown and steaming, they should have appeared on the magazine’s cover instead of the turkey. Everyone knows pie is the best part of Thanksgiving.

  Two days later, I was in the shower at Meg’s and looked down at my chest, where I saw what looked like a small-but-dead black bug. After a second glance I realized, no, it was not an insect. It was a false eyelash that had come unglued from my eyelid. The sight of it made me laugh. I almost kept it as a souvenir. Not only was the experience of being in the famous cookbook’s kitchen a privilege, I had proof that, with enough makeup, I could still pass for something other than a weary widow.

  CHAPTER

  22

  I didn’t know yet where I was going after the state fair. The fair had pumped me up, fueled my spirit with life, but like attending a big trade show or working a sales convention—or skydiving—when the adrenaline high from “being on” inevitably wore off, the burst of energy was replaced with a heavy wave of fatigue.

  Regardless, I was determined to make it down to the southeast corner of the state for a tour of my childhood homes in Ottumwa before moving on to my next adventure.

  Ottumwa, my birthplace, lies ninety miles southeast of Des Moines. It is not only where I was introduced to life—from birth to bike riding to The Brady Bunch—it is where I was introduced to pie. I might have maxed out on pie at the fair, but by God, I wasn’t going to leave Iowa without sampling a slice of banana cream from the Canteen Lunch in the Alley.

  I pointed my MINI south on Highway 163, and within a mile of leaving the Des Moines city limits, urban life vanished, and was replaced by All Things Rural. The sudden falling away of civilization was a foreign concept after living in the heavily populated sprawl of the West Coast, where one city limit and strip mall merges right into the next. The only thing I would see for the next hour and a half was corn.

  Halfway to Ottumwa, I took a quick detour off the highway to a town called Pella, a Dutch settlement famous for its window manufacturer, its springtime tulip festival, wooden shoes and its European bakeries. In the spirit of retracing my childhood haunts, I pulled into Pella’s town square and found Jaarsma Bakery, where I had developed a love for Dutch letters, an S-shaped pastry filled with almond paste. Eyeing the pastry display case like a hungry kid, I wanted to buy one of everything—butter cookies, cinnamon bread, apple rings, chocolate-dipped almond sticks and, of course, Dutch letters. But after two weeks of eating all that pie, I was able to exercise restraint and bought only two big
S letters—one for an afternoon snack, the other for breakfast. On the other hand, given the dearth of stores or truck stops or anything, for that matter, in this remote corner of the state, I might have been wise to stock up on at least a dozen in case of a roadside breakdown.

  I continued on 163 South and noted how the landscape became increasingly hilly. Make no mistake, the hills were still filled with endless rows of corn. But if anyone ever says, “Iowa is flat,” then you can be sure they haven’t actually been to Iowa. Or ridden their bike here.

  The highway makes a long, gradual descent into Ottumwa, the biggest “city” in the region. Ottumwa’s population was 20,000 when I grew up there, but has grown to 25,000, supported by a meat-packing plant. (If you’ve seen the movie Fast Food Nation—well, that’s all I’m going to say.)

  The first thing I thought when I entered the city limits was, How could this place have grown? It looks dead.

  Not only did it look dead, it felt dead. I drove through the downtown streets and recognized where Younkers department store, Kresge, Woolworths, Bookin Jewelry and the movie theaters all used to be, places of bustling commerce when I was a child. As ten-year-old kids, we could take the city bus downtown and shop by ourselves. Ottumwa had been an ideal—and safe—place for a kid to practice independence. At Younkers, my sister and I had bought our school clothes without our mother, who let us bring home our selections “on approval.” At Woolworths, I had shopped with my grandma for my first training bra. At Kresge, we had stocked up on school supplies and candy. At the movie theater, my dad had taken us kids to Wednesday matinees. In the place of all these businesses now was…nothing. Just empty, decaying buildings. It was—in one word—depressing.