Call Me a Cab

38

Mrs. Hilyerd, a woman as rangy and bony as her husband, was the sort of cook who believes food should taste like itself. We sat in a small enclosed porch at the rear of their house, which had been furnished with three completely non-matching tables and a whole lot of chairs that had nothing in common except one or two slats missing out of their backs, while Mrs. Hilyerd served us herself, on heavy china dishes featuring handpainted crabapples on a cream ground. The food was so delicious that I just kept eating everything I saw; Mrs. Hilyerd can consider herself lucky I didn’t take a bite out of her hand.

We had neither wine nor liquor, but with such food alcohol would have been an excess. “We’re Temperance,” Mrs. Hilyerd had explained, “but we don’t push our views on others. If you have a bottle and you want empty glasses...” When we assured her we had no bottle, she filled the glasses with crisp icy water from a jug she kept in the refrigerator.

At the end of the meal, to put a metaphor in precisely the wrong place, she spilled the beans. Watching, with pardonable satisfaction, as we engulfed her hot apple pie (with cheese slices), she said to Katharine, “You won’t get a pie like that over to the Holiday Inn.”

“No, I’m sure I won’t,” Katharine said, looking guilty. I stared at her, and she became very absorbed in slicing a bit of cheese with the side of her fork.

Mrs. Hilyerd went back to the kitchen. From deeper in the house came the rattle of canned laughter; Mr. Hilyerd watching television. I sipped my glass of water and said, “You knew about the Holiday Inn.”

“Mr. Hilyerd told me, when we first got here.” She looked at me with a tentative smile. “He said he gives everybody the choice, he doesn’t want to take advantage of people just because they’re lost.”

“But you decided to stay.”

“I thought, if we went to the Holiday Inn, the fight would last longer.”

“Katharine,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t say this, but there are times when I wish I was Barry, and this is one of them.”

“Eat your pie,” she said. “You don’t want to hurt Mrs. Hilyerd’s feelings.”

So I ate my pie, grinning at her while chewing, until all at once she put her fork down, frowned across the table at me, and said, “Wait a minute.”

Oh oh. I drank water and looked as innocent as possible. “Mmm?”

“You knew about the Holiday Inn.”

“I took a walk out behind the cabins,” I admitted. “I saw it.”

“Is it that close?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She looked at me, very sternly, and then she began to grin. “I know what I shouldn’t say,” she told me, “and I’m not going to say it.”

Mrs. Hilyerd appeared in the doorway: “More pie?”