She didn’t want to come. The first few dates had been magic but then things changed and her gut instinct said that something was wrong. He used to be so charming but said that work was making him withdrawn. He’d been acting self-centered and worse – callous. But he said that he’d make it up to her with dinner and something special for dessert. And so — there they were with coq au vin and candlelight. She sat sipping her red wine; he played with the ice in his diet coke.
His voice was tight and stuck in his throat as he prattled on, nervous and off-key – saying something about how his mom baked cherry pie for him whenever he’d had a bad day and that a homemade pie could fix just about anything. “Maybe that’s true” she said, looking into his eyes. She pictured him in his kitchen — his fingers wringing flour and shortening together – pressing and rolling the ball of dough into a convergence of home and love and pastry. But she detected no warm-baked-sweet smells of pie radiating from his oven.
He went on at the table talking in headlines — about the Red Sox, the war, even the weather. Anything but them. He was sideways on a high wire and couldn’t slow down or even pull away from her gaze. It hurt her to see someone she cared about go on like that but she let him wallow in it as he long as he needed to. And through all of this — she had this kind of amazed-stunned smile on her face while they ate and drank. Maybe a dinner of protein would settle him down and then, well, cherry pie was on its way.
He proudly presented the pie to her – it was baked in one of those throwaway aluminum pans. She so wanted to believe in this man – this meal – that even the take-away tin didn’t totally dent her faith. Still her thoughts flashed to all those roadside pie stands tauting ‘mom’s own, home made, locally grown.’ But they’re not really, she’s tasted them before and they’re a sham. As far as she was concerned honest pie was sacred.
The pale top of this pie looked like molded play-dough that created the illusion of woven strips of a real crust. In her first and last bite she tasted thick corn syrup + starch and cold gelatinous canned fruit laid to rest between the dead weight of factory processed dough.
It was a fraud.
He could’ve warmed it up in the oven but that would’ve made it pure mockery even worse. It was such a waste and for nothing. In the end – it was too bad for him — because all she’d wanted to do was start from scratch.
