Chapter 12: The Pie Tent

The pie tent at the Hancock County Fair holds three hundred folding chairs and a plywood stage.

The fair rents a projector screen to show the bids.

My mother had taken the children to the midway for cotton candy.

I had insisted, and she had not asked why.

I sat at the front table between Darlene and Todd in my yellow cardigan, with Dale at the end of the row.

My husband had a beer and a pleasant face.

His mother wore her best church apron and a corsage of silk daisies.

The auctioneer sold a lemon meringue for ninety dollars, and a rhubarb for a hundred and twenty.

At the last one, Darlene stood up.

She walked up the steps to the stage with her hands folded, and the auctioneer stepped back to let her pass.

"Neighbors," Darlene said into the microphone. "I won't take your time."

"I've baked for this church for fifty years," she said, "and I want to say a word about family."

The tent got quiet.

"A family isn't what it looks like from the outside. A family is what it does in the dark."

Somewhere to my left, Dale put his hand flat on his knee.

"This summer I've been heartbroken," said Darlene. "Heartbroken to learn the real reason this family has been falling apart."

She nodded to the back of the tent.

The big screen over the stage lit up white.

Then it showed a photograph.

It was Dale's gray-green truck, parked on Sandusky Street in front of my mother's house at six in the morning.

The next one was me and Dale at the Van Buren diner, leaning across a booth over two slices of pie.

The next was the back lot of Rieder Hardware at night, in the loading dock light, with me sitting on his tailgate.

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