Pie Town

by Lynne Hinton

He denied it, even though she finally was able to use her cane and maneuver herself around her neighbor. When she saw two places set at the table, she raised her eyebrows at Oris, looking like she had caught him in a lie, which she had, and then she just shook her head and walked away. “Whoever she is, I hope she don’t mind her dinner burning.”

  And Oris had run back to the stove, realizing he had left the burner on high and scorched the potatoes. He wondered about Millie, whether she’d say anything to anybody, but he knew he didn’t really care. They could say he was entertaining a woman or had a girlfriend or even that he was losing his mind, he didn’t care. Alice had visited, and that meant she would come again.

  Still, he didn’t understand this dream. He didn’t understand what Alice was trying to make him see when it came to Father George. What did that man have to do with his family? he wondered. What could that young priest do that would comfort his dead wife?

  Oris considered Father George, how strangely he had been acting since the fire, how he had visited Alex when Oris was there and couldn’t stand still, wouldn’t look the boy in the eyes, didn’t pray. Oris had asked the priest if something was wrong, if he needed help of some kind, but the man had just shaken his head and mumbled something about it all working out.

  Alex had noticed it too. When he asked to speak to the priest alone, Oris had left the room. Father George came out a few minutes later looking even more disturbed, as if the boy had said something that spooked him. When Oris asked his great-grandson if everything was okay, the boy had just shaken his head and said that things were not right at all and that he didn’t know how to fix them.

  And now Alice was telling Oris that he was supposed to stop the priest from running out of town and bring him back. The only problem was that Oris didn’t understand what he was bringing him back to. Or who. There didn’t seem to be anybody who really needed him when he was working or missed him now that he was gone.

  Father George stumbled his way through Mass most weeks. He had no real gifts of ministry that Oris could see. He was as awkward with people as he was reading scripture. His prayers were memorized and hardly heartfelt. He couldn’t sing, didn’t lead with much authority. Frankly, Oris didn’t see why the man was in the ministry to begin with. He didn’t seem much like a priest or even a man of faith. And Oris certainly didn’t understand why Father George was needed in Pie Town.

  He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror and stared. He was surprised because he saw what he knew Alice saw. He saw how he had participated in the priest’s departure. He hadn’t given George a fair shake. The truth was, nobody in Pie Town had.

  Oris had teased Father George about rattlesnakes and yelled at him about his driving. Bernie King had given him a hard time about the skunks and told him he’d never find friends in Pie Town. Fedora Snow worried him to death with church politics, and everybody raised eyebrows about his relationship with that new girl. The town had done a poor job of offering the young man any sense of hospitality, any kind of decent reception upon his arrival or even during his first few weeks, so that if he was hiding something, needing a friend or a confidant, he had certainly been persuaded that he wouldn’t find it in Pie Town.

  Oris felt a little guilty. He knew he could have done a better job of welcoming the priest. He knew he had been hard on the man. He had attended only one service. He hadn’t even gone up to the church after the fire to see if the priest needed any clothes or wanted help trying to replace what had been lost. Oris had even thought, as did a few others in town, that Father George might have had something to do with the fire, something to do with Trina, the one everybody believed started the fire.

  He rolled down the window a bit to get some fresh air and wondered if the priest knew the girl was pregnant. An old man, Oris was usually one who missed those kinds of things, but he hadn’t missed that one. She came waddling up to his table at the diner, shirt pulled tight across her little bulge of a belly, and even made a comment about how she was surprised that she didn’t get sick being around so much food, how the baby was making her hungry all the time instead. That’s how she said it, “The baby is making me hungry.” Oris had not responded. He was so shocked that the girl was talking so openly about a woman’s way, about an unmarried woman’s way, he had not known how to comment. Nobody else in the diner had spoken a word either. They were still mad at her for burning down the church, they sure weren’t going to congratulate her for giving birth to a baby born out of wedlock.

  “Is that who needs the priest?” Oris asked out loud, still not sure. “That girl?” he added.

  He turned to look beside him. “It ain’t his, is it?” he asked, and then had to smile because he could feel his dead wife punch him in the ribs.

  “Well, even if that baby is his, I can tell you that he doesn’t want anything to do with that girl. That’s been obvious since they drove into town together. He’s scared of her for some reason. There’s either a history there or she reminds him of somebody else. So I doubt I can get him to come back to take care of her. You better give me something more to work with than that.”

  Oris thought about the night before and how Alice had spoken to him, pulled him out of sleep and sent him on what was feeling like a wild goose chase, how he had received clarity about who he was supposed to go and find, just not what he was supposed to say when he found him.

  It happened just before the break of dawn, when he had been dreaming about a pool of clear blue water, the sun bright and full, the sky cloudless. It was the most beautiful body of water he had ever seen, and he wanted to dive into it, let the blueness cover him, swim beneath its unblemished surface. He dipped his toes into it, and it was cool and refreshing, and he was just taking off his shirt, pulling off his pants to jump in, when she had called him. As clear as anytime she had ever called out his name. “Oris, Oris, wake up,” she said. “Wake up and get Father George.”

  Oris woke up and never saw her, never felt her touch, only was clear in his senses that she had been present, that she had given him the dream of blueness, he knew that. And she was telling her husband to get up and find the priest. He had waited the entire morning for more instructions, a detailed direction, some sensible motive, for her to join him for breakfast, but there had been no other contact, no other information. At a table set for two, he had eaten his morning meal alone. But for some reason Oris did not understand, some unknown and otherworldly reason, Father George Morris was going to have to come back to Pie Town.

  Oris noticed the road sign just as he drove past it. He was four miles from Gallup.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Trina folded her clothes and stuffed them in a duffel bag she’d gotten from Hector, the dishwasher at the diner. She sat down on the sofa, pulled off her shoes, and rubbed her swollen feet. She had just returned from work, a lunch shift on a Saturday, and she was tired. Her ride, Frank Twinhorse, was driving down to Texas to go to his son Raymond’s boot camp graduation ceremony, and she knew that he would be there to pick her up in a couple of hours.

  Trina glanced around her apartment, still deciding what she was taking and what she was leaving. In her few months living there, she had accumulated quite a few things, and she was having a difficult time letting some of her stuff go. It wasn’t like her to be sentimental about pictures and knickknacks, coffee mugs and books, but as she glanced around she realized that she had started to make herself a home there in that garage apartment. Noticing the way she had decorated, she was surprised to realize that she had built a little nest for herself.

  Since leaving home at sixteen, Trina had never been one to stay too long in a place, had never attached herself to a house, so feeling this way about an apartment—a couple of rooms and the things she had bought at yard sales and thrift shops—was not anything she had ever really experienced before. It never dawned on her that she had made a home for herself in Pie Town and that she would feel a little sad to leave it.

  The truth was that Trina didn’t usually make h
erself at home in the places she stayed, but she was also usually not one ever to be run off. When she was six and all the other children ganged up against her one afternoon at the playground, claiming she was half-breed, part Indian and part white trash, unfit to come near them, she had simply pushed them aside and taken her place on the swing set and refused to leave. They all stood around her, boys and girls, yelling at her, spitting on her, throwing clods of dirt, but she was unflappable, keeping them at bay because she kept swinging, higher and higher, threatening anyone to come too close or they’d be pummeled by her feet, up and back, up and back. One boy tried to catch the swing as she pressed past him, but when she noticed what he was doing, she kicked backward hard and fast, catching him in the throat and knocking him down. And even then, even with the other kids saying she had killed Ricky Daughtry, she kept swinging. They rolled the boy away from her, and he eventually caught his breath and got up. Finally, Ricky leading the pack, they all walked off, leaving her alone, leaving her to her swing and her resolve never to be pushed away from a place she had chosen to be.

  Over and over that kind of thing would happen to Trina. Classmates, especially the girls, teachers, coaches, pastors, parents, every season there was somebody telling her she didn’t belong somewhere. And she refused to bow down or cower like a dog with its tail stuck between its legs and leave. It wasn’t pride or some desire to be included that taught her to stand her ground; she usually left those unwelcoming groups eventually. It was something else, something her mother had passed along to her daughter before losing herself to the bottle and the addiction she wrapped herself in.

  It was some notion that Trina learned before she even knew she was learning survival skills. It was the instinct she was given that she was always going to have to fight, going to have to make a place for herself. She knew before she could walk and talk that her life was going to be a battle, and she never entered a place, joined a gathering, walked into a classroom, or ran onto a soccer field expecting to be received. So that when she was bullied or rejected, she didn’t run off and pout or get her feelings hurt, she just assumed that was the price for being a part of a group. She accepted that bad behavior and unwelcoming gestures were just a part of the initiation rites of any party or company. She wasn’t turned off or turned away by how the other kids acted toward her. So, while others called her obstinate or mulish, she just thought she was playing by the rules that somebody put in place long before she had anything to say about it, and the only time she was ever surprised or taken aback was when she was accepted, when she was welcomed.

  Trina had built her life on a set of beliefs that said she was different but deserving, social but wary, friendly but decidedly not in need of friends. She had made her way through childhood and adolescence, middle school and a year of high school, Parkway Baptist Assembly and two Presbyterian churches, parties, Girl Scouts, soccer teams, after-school activities, and even a stint on student council—after being told she would have to be elected and ultimately she was—fighting to be included, refusing to be pushed out. And she stayed counted as a member in good standing of those groups until she was bored or restless.

  She left when the others had given up trying to bully her or dismiss her or overlook her. It was only when she had defeated their hostility and won some kind of acceptance, though always with a measure of resistance, that she decided to quit, to walk away and leave. Trina prided herself on never, ever being told when to leave. Until now. Until Pie Town, this place she thought had received her, this place she had thought she would call home.

  She glanced over at the small table she had covered with a brightly colored tablecloth. Bea had given it to her when Trina commented on how much she liked it. It was a sample for the diner, one that Bea had not chosen. So instead of packaging it up and mailing it back to the restaurant supply store, she gave it to Trina. And Trina, never having owned a tablecloth, never having had her own table, washed it with dish soap and made sure it was dry before spreading it over the old table in the apartment, then added a small vase of flowers and a set of salt and pepper shakers. She loved that table with its bright colors dancing across the top. She got up from the sofa and sat down at the table, smoothing down the cloth and following the floral design with her finger, a gesture of good-bye.

  She wasn’t sure if it was being pregnant that had somehow made her sentimental about her decorations, a tablecloth and knickknacks, and if it was also the reason she had become sensitive for the first time to how she was being treated. She didn’t know if she was already experiencing some kind of maternal drive to protect somebody else and create a homelike atmosphere, or if she was just tired of not being received.

  Maybe, she thought, having finally experienced friendship in her life, the real sense of family she enjoyed in Amarillo with Dusty and Jolene and Lester, she was spoiled now, needy in some way she had never known. Once she got a taste of full acceptance, genuine love, sincere hospitality, and a place she looked forward to coming to after a day’s work, maybe it had broken her, forced a crack in that hard thick wall around her heart. She wasn’t sure where the feeling came from or how it happened, but Pie Town had hurt her.

  Trina got up from the table and removed the salt and pepper shakers, setting them on the back of the stove, pulled off the tablecloth, and folded it, having decided that she would find room for it in her duffel bag. She laid it on the table and looked around at the other stuff she wanted to take with her. She walked over to the three built-in shelves by the old television that was in the apartment when she arrived. She picked up the picture of her with Alex at his birthday party, but took it out of the small frame she had bought from the thrift store in Quemado when she went shopping with Malene. She took the tiny ceramic horse Hector had brought her from Phoenix, a thank-you gift for working his shifts, wrapped it in a piece of newspaper, and placed it in a zippered compartment of the bag. She removed the picture of the Rio Grande River that Roger had brought her from his house to hang on the empty west wall and then put it back, realizing she would have no way to carry it.

  She flipped through the pages of a few books, old pocket-size Tony Hillerman mysteries she had been reading, a Bible that, like the television, had been there when she moved in, a phone book, and was returning the last paperback to the shelf when a piece of paper slipped out and fell to her feet. She picked it up and walked back to the sofa. As soon as she saw it she realized what it was. That piece of paper had been the final push for her to get out of town.

  The day she found the paper stuck in the screen door had not been an unusual day. She was helping Fred and Bea clean the diner, working a few hours after the lunch shift, so that they would pass the upcoming state inspection. Hector and Francine had gone home. Even though more than a few customers had asked them about their newest employee and what role she had played in the fire at the church, and even though Francine had complained that a pregnant waitress got better tips than an old barren one, Fred and Bea had not asked Trina about her involvement in the fire, nor had they mentioned her pregnancy. They had participated in the whispers behind her back, made their own speculations about what she was doing at the church late at night and who the father was, but they had primarily stayed out of the town gossip. In fact, they had given Trina more hours of work, not because they could afford her and needed the extra help, but because they felt sorry for the young woman they had come to like.

  Trina had hardly noticed the harassment from the folks in Pie Town. She didn’t even flinch when Bernie brought up the fact that he had seen her in the field the night of the fire and asked her in front of more than a few people what she was doing out there. She had answered him honestly and without hesitation. “I went to the church to pray,” she had replied loud enough for everyone to hear. “The last time I heard, that was not a crime. And when I found that the church doors were locked, I prayed in the field, talked to God right out in the moonlight. He seemed okay with that, even if you aren’t.” And then she had taken his empty dishes
from the table in front of him, dropped them in the container she was using to bus the tables, smiled, and walked back to the kitchen.

  She had confronted a group of high school kids sitting at the counter one afternoon. They had stopped at the diner for sodas and ice cream but then couldn’t let an opportunity to harass the new girl pass them by. Two of them were friends with Rob’s girlfriend Katie; Trina had already run into them once downtown and endured their attacks. One of the girls, plump and angry, pushed her ice cream across the counter back to Trina, complaining that she didn’t want her sundae made by a pregnant fire-starter. The other girls had giggled, hiding their faces behind their hands, and Trina, standing behind the counter directly in front of the girl, took the sundae and ate it herself. Then she patted her belly and said, “It might be a good thing for you to lay off the ice cream. Otherwise people might start to think you’re in the same boat as me.”

  That had made the girl so mad that she got up and left her friends sitting there, face-to-face with Trina and without nearly the same amount of bravado and meanness. They paid their bill and left.

  Trina had found the boxes of matches on her landing, told Malene about that, and had even caught a couple of teenagers planning to leave a can of gasoline at her front door. She had heard them creep up the steps, and she opened the door as soon as she knew they were there. One of them jumped off the landing, and the other slipped and fell, tumbling down the stairs and taking quite a beating. Even though all of these incidents had troubled Trina a bit, it was that piece of paper, finding it stuck inside her door, watching the young woman she had never seen before walking down the street putting fliers in all the doors of all the houses around her, that was the final straw.

  Trina opened it and read:

  Come to the church.

  Come see what the fire has done.

  Sunday, 10:30 a.m.