My Ex-Husband Asked for My Pie Recipe From His Nursing Home Bed. I Set the Terms

I did not sleep much that night. Around two in the morning I got up, put the kettle on, and sat at my kitchen table with the radio off and the furnace ticking.

The next morning I drove to Trinity Lutheran and found Pastor Ingrid Lund in her office with a cup of coffee and a stack of Advent envelopes. Ingrid is fifty-eight and practical. She has a way of asking one question and then waiting until you answer it yourself.

I told her everything. The land deal. The house. The recliner. Gerald’s sixty thousand dollars.

“So what do you want to do?” she asked.

“I want him to be sorry,” I said. “I want him to know what it cost me.”

“He knows,” Ingrid said. “He’s been living with it for two years, same as you.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to take him back.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Nobody is telling you to take him back, Bev. I’m only wondering whether there’s a difference between forgiving him and letting him live in a recliner.”

I did not answer that. She let the silence sit between us, which is her gift.

That afternoon Lorna Pfeiffer came over the back fence with a box of tomatoes from her basement shelves. Lorna is sixty-four, a widow who lives across the alley. In twenty years she has never once been afraid to tell me I am a fool.

“You’re going to take that man in,” she said, before I had even finished. “I can see it on your face.”

“I haven’t decided anything.”

“You’ve decided. You just haven’t told yourself yet.” She set the tomatoes on my counter. “Thirty-eight years he made you cry in the car, and you’re going to make him a bed.”

“It’s not a bed. It’s the sewing room. It’s Mom’s old sewing room.”

“Oh, Bev.”

I went back to Good Shepherd on the twenty-seventh of November, and this time I went in with a plan. I did not bring a pie. I brought a pad of paper and a pen.

Duane looked at the pen, then at me. “You’re going to write me up?”

“I’m going to tell you the terms,” I said. “You can listen or you can stay here.”

I told him the spare room in my duplex on East 12th Street was his if he wanted it. He could have it for $375 a month, which is about what a room in a shared house costs in this town. I told him Tyler Osgood, the young line cook who rents the downstairs, pays his rent in cash on the first and keeps to himself. I told him I lived upstairs and would not be his nurse, his mother, or his excuse.

Duane said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “What’s the condition?”

“You learn to make my crust. My real crust. Lard and butter, ice water, a splash of vinegar, rolled between wax paper. You make it right, you make it on your own, and I eat it without complaint. Then we’ll talk about what comes after.”

He laughed, a short rough sound, and then he winced because the laugh pulled at his face. “You never let me in your kitchen, Bev. Thirty-eight years.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wanted one thing in that house that was mine.”

He looked at his left hand for a while. “Fair enough,” he said. “Fair enough.”

We settled the rest in about ten minutes. He would keep his own medicines in the drawer by the bed. He would pay the rent in full on the first, no excuses. He would not drink in my house, and he would not borrow from Tyler or from anybody else. He agreed to every word, and I could see what it cost him to say yes.

On the third of December I called Gerald Haugen. He drove his pickup down from Brandon the next morning, helped Duane out of the wheelchair and into the cab, then carried the cardboard box of belongings to the back of the truck. The box was heavy. When Gerald lifted the flaps, I saw a stack of old pie tins inside, dull aluminum, the paint worn off the handles.

Gerald said nothing about it, and neither did I.

We drove Duane to 2208 East 12th Street on the fourth of December. I showed him the spare room, the narrow bed, the window that faces the alley, and the sewing machine still under its cover. He ran his good hand over the cover and did not speak for a long moment.

That evening I set a quart Mason jar on the counter. Inside was a ball of chilled dough, wrapped in wax paper and pressed flat at the bottom.

“Start Monday,” I said. “Five o’clock, same as the bus shop. I’ll be asleep, and you won’t wake me.”

He looked at the jar and then at me. “Monday,” he said.

On Monday morning I came down the stairs at five-thirty in my robe, and the light was already on in my kitchen. Duane was at the counter with flour on his shirt, the jar lid off and set aside. Beside the sink, lined up in a neat row like soldiers, were the old pie tins from the recliner box, every one of them washed clean.