Nothing to Do with Christmas

The first man ever to hand Jo Fallon's pie back to her untasted was a big, quiet rancher in a silverbelly hat, and he did it at half past nine on her third morning in Cedar Bend, in front of the whole counter.

At four in the morning Main Street belonged to the furnace and the walk-in compressor, and to Jo Fallon, who had been awake since a quarter past three and had already lost one argument with Ruth Nakamura's oven.

It ran hot at the back left. She had learned that on her first morning, with a tray of cinnamon rolls that came out bronze on one corner and blond on the other, and she had learned it again on her second, when she forgot. This morning she rotated the trays at nine minutes without being told, and felt absurdly pleased with herself, the way she had felt at nineteen the first time her grandmother let her shape the Saturday loaves alone.

The kitchen was narrow and old and spotless in the places that mattered. Two steel tables, a six-burner range with a flat-top welded on beside it, a mixer older than Jo bolted to the floor, and above the prep sink a shelf holding the binder. The binder was the closest thing the Blue Camas had to a constitution. Three inches thick, grease-spotted to translucence in places, its index cards slipped into plastic sleeves that had gone cloudy with flour. Ruth's handwriting was small and upright and gave no quarter. Cinnamon roll — 1 batch = 4 doz. DO NOT cut the butter, Dell can tell. Sour cherry — tart cherries ONLY, I mean it. Chicken pot pie, Thursdays.

And one card near the back that said only December.

Sour-cream raisin. Jo had made it twice now, and it was a good pie, an old plain custard pie of the kind her grandmother's church ladies used to bring to funerals, soft and spiced and rich under a meringue that wanted a hot oven and a steady eye. There was no name on the card. Every other card in the binder said where it came from, Mom's, or from the Lindquist girl, or once, crossly, off the back of the oatmeal box, don't tell anybody. This one said December and nothing else, as if the month had invented it.

She pulled the meringues at twenty to six and stood back to look at them, two tall pies with their peaks gone the color of toast, and something in her chest eased half a notch. Three mornings in. She had filled Ruth's case three mornings running and nobody had sent anything back.

It was still somebody else's kitchen. Every drawer opened on a stranger's idea of where the whisks went. But she had her own knives in a roll on the shelf by the binder, and her braid pinned up under the black kerchief, and her white jacket hanging open over the black thermal that was the only thing she owned that survived a fourteen-hour shift and still fit like it meant to, and she thought that if she could not have her own kitchen this winter, she could at least be very good in Ruth's.

Lorna came in the back at ten to six, stamping snow off her boots and unwinding a scarf that went around her neck three times.

"Smells like church in here," Lorna said, which Jo had already learned was a compliment.

Lorna was fifty-something, tall and stooped and dry as kindling. She had worked Ruth's counter for nine years and before that the hospital cafeteria in Livingston, and she wore her reading glasses on a chain of red beads her granddaughter had strung for her, and she called every man over forty "hon" in a tone that made it sound like a diagnosis. She looked at the cinnamon rolls cooling on the rack, then at the pies, and lifted one eyebrow by a sixteenth of an inch.

"You put the December in the case already?"

"It's December," Jo said.

"So it is." Lorna tied her apron. "Ruth usually holds it till the fifth or so. Lets folks miss it first."

"Well, Ruth's in Bozeman with a new hip, and I've got a case to fill."

Lorna made a noise that committed her to nothing and went out to put the coffee on.

At six the bell over the door went for the first time, and Jo heard it from the kitchen, an old flat brass note that Lorna had told her on the first morning had been hanging there since before Lorna was hired, since before half the people under it were born. By half past six Jo was on the grill. The flat-top had its own temper, hotter toward the pass-through, and she learned that too, a pan of hash browns at a time. Eggs over easy, eggs scrambled soft for Mrs. Somebody who had sent them back hard the first morning and had not yet forgiven the substitution. Bacon in rows. Pancakes the size of a hubcap, because Ruth's pancakes were the size of a hubcap and Lorna had made it clear that this was not a negotiable item.

Through the pass-through window she watched the room fill the way it had the last two mornings. Ranch trucks first, the men who had already fed, coming in with the cold standing off their coats in a visible breath. Hats on the hooks, or hats crown-down on the stool beside them. Vinyl booths down the window side, steamed glass up to the height of a seated man, eight stools along the counter, and the pie case at the end with its glass fogged low where the warm shelf sat. Coffee, hot grease, cinnamon. Every head came round at the bell and went back to its plate.

Dell from the feed store took the third stool at five past seven with his cap on the counter beside his cup, exactly where he had put it on her first morning and her second. Curt Ostberg came in behind him, a long, weathered fence post of a man in his sixties who answered good morning with a lift of the chin so slight Jo had first mistaken it for a cough. And at a quarter to eight Bo Tegland, fifty and favoring one knee, eased himself onto the fifth stool and told Lorna that if anybody had touched the cinnamon rolls he would hear about it.

"Nobody's touched them," Lorna said. "The new girl made them."

"That's what I'm worried about."

Jo put his eggs up in the window with a little more force than they needed, and Tegland, who had heard the plate land, grinned at her through the pass-through like a man who had got exactly what he came for.

She was half proud and half lost all morning, and both halves knew it. She knew how to bake. She had run the pastry side of a hotel kitchen in Bozeman for six years, had done four hundred plated desserts on a wedding Saturday and a twelve-tier croquembouche for a man who owned a ski resort, right up until the morning in November when the hotel was sold out from under her kitchen. What she did not know was this room, which knew itself so thoroughly, and which watched her with polite and total interest, as though she were weather coming over the ridge.

By nine the rush thinned. Jo scraped down the flat-top and came out to the pie case with a fresh rack of rolls, and stood a minute behind the counter with a towel over her shoulder, letting the front of the house look at her and looking back.

At half past nine the bell rang and the room did a thing she had not seen it do yet. It did not go quiet. It lowered itself, a notch, the way a radio does when somebody reaches over and turns it down without turning it off.

The man who came in was big, and he came in the way big men did when they had spent a lot of years not wanting to knock anything over. Tall, a little over six feet, wide through the shoulders under a blanket-lined brown chore coat that had been good once and was still good now, the canvas gone soft and dark at the cuffs. Silverbelly hat, the crown sweat-darkened at the band. Dark Wranglers and good boots with snow still packed in the welt. He took the hat off at the door and she saw short sandy hair with a hat line pressed into it, a close-cut beard going grey at the chin, a nose that had been broken once and set by somebody in a hurry.

He did not look at anybody. He walked the length of the counter and sat down on the last stool, the one at the far end by the pie case, and set his hat crown-down on the counter beside him and pulled off his gloves, fleece-lined leather, one finger at a time.

Lorna had the cup in front of him before the second glove was off. Black. She did not ask.

"Morning, hon."

"Lorna."

That was all. One word, and his voice was low and level, and he said her name like he was handing it back to her intact.

"Roll?" Lorna said.

He nodded once. Lorna plated one of Jo's cinnamon rolls, the big ones, the ones with the bronze on top and the soft pull at the middle, and set it down, and the man ate it with a fork, slowly, without looking up, the way a person ate when they had eaten alone for a long time and stopped expecting conversation with it.

Jo watched him eat her roll. She could not have said why it mattered. It was Ruth's recipe, Ruth's butter, Ruth's oven running hot at the back left. But he ate all of it, and when he was done he set the fork down square on the plate, and something in her said, There.

"Who's that?" she said to Lorna at the coffee station, low.

"Nels Haugen." Lorna refilled a pot without looking at it. "Sixmile Creek. Comes in about this time every day. Coffee, a roll, and he's gone."

"Every day?"

"Every day for two winters." Lorna glanced at her over the red beads. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Whatever that face is about to do."

Jo did not know what her face was about to do. She knew only that she had two December pies in the case with exactly one slice gone between them, and that the man at the end of the counter had eaten her cinnamon roll like it had done something for him, and that she was a person who, when something was wrong, fed it. Her grandmother had been the same. Somebody's husband had left, somebody's barn had burned, and there would be Nana Fallon at the back door with a pie under a dish towel before the smoke was off the ground.

So she cut a slice of the December pie, a good one, a clean wedge with the meringue standing tall, and put it on one of Ruth's thick white plates with a fork, and carried it down the length of the counter herself, and set it in front of Nels Haugen.

"On the house," she said. "I'm Jo. I'm covering Ruth's kitchen. You ate that roll like you meant it, so I figure you'll know if I've got this one right."

He looked at the pie.

He looked at it for what felt like a long time and was probably two seconds. Up close his eyes were a blue-grey, pale against the windburn, and they did not move to her face. Nothing in his face moved at all. Then he put two fingers on the edge of the plate and slid it back across the counter toward her, slowly, until it was in front of her and not him.

"I don't eat that pie," he said. "Never will."

He said it quietly. He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way a man reads off a fence measurement, and the room, which had lowered itself a notch when he came in, lowered itself another.

Jo stood there with the pie in front of her and heat climbing her throat, because she was not used to having things handed back to her in front of eleven people, and because there was nothing in the slice to object to. She had tasted it at five. It was right.

"It's a good pie," she said.

"I expect it is."

He finished his coffee. He put a five on the counter under the saucer, stood, set the hat on, and pulled his gloves on one at a time, and nodded to Lorna, and walked the length of the room to the door without looking back. The bell went. Through the steamed window Jo watched the white flatbed pull out from the curb with its exhaust standing straight up in the cold, and turn north, and go.

The radio turned back up.

"Well," said Curt Ostberg, into his cup. It was the longest speech she had heard out of him.

"Told you," Tegland said to nobody in particular. "Didn't I say? First week."

"Nobody told me anything," Jo said.

"I'm telling you now." Tegland swiveled on his stool to face her, his bad knee out stiff into the aisle. "That man eats Ruth's roll and drinks Ruth's coffee and he has not eaten a slice of that pie in this café in two years. Ruth quit putting it in front of him."

"Why?"

Tegland shrugged. Curt looked into his coffee. Dell, on the third stool, had gone faintly pink across the tops of his ears, and was turning his cup a quarter turn on its saucer, and then another.

Nobody said why.

Jo looked at the slice sitting in front of her, the fork beside it untouched, and she felt the old thing come up in her, the stubborn thing, the one that had got her through culinary school on a scholarship and twelve years of other people's kitchens. "Nobody's ever not wanted pie," she said. "Not in my whole life. He just hasn't had the right one."

"Oh, here we go," Tegland said happily.

"He doesn't want pie, honey," Curt said. "He doesn't want much of anything. Man feeds a hundred and sixty pairs by himself off a flatbed, comes in here for coffee, goes home. He's not a project."

"I didn't say he was a project."

"You've got the face," Lorna said from the coffee station.

"I do not have a face."

"Twenty dollars," Tegland said, "says you can't get him to eat one slice of that pie by Christmas."

The counter turned toward him in one movement, the way a herd turns.

"One slice," Tegland went on, warming to it, holding up a finger. "And not just eat it. Eat it and mean it. He's got to eat a slice of pie and want Christmas back by the twenty-fifth. That's the terms."

"How would anybody even know if he wants Christmas back?"

"Oh, we'd know," Tegland said. "Whole valley'd know. He hasn't had so much as a wreath on that gate in two years."

"I'm in," Curt said, and put a twenty on the counter, flat, and squared it with one finger.

Tegland laid his on top. They both looked at Dell.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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