Free The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Page A

here, he said. What do you know? We did.
    My gram’s secret ingredient, he said. Scatter a little of this stuff over the crust before you put your filling in—just so it looks like salt on a road in winter, when there’s ice—and you’ve seen your last of soggy crust. This stuff soaks up the juices for you, without that cornstarch flavor. You know those pies I’m talking about here, right, Henry? The ones with that gluey consistency, like the inside of a Pop-Tart.
    I did. We had about a hundred boxes of them in our freezer at that very moment.
    Frank cut bits of butter over the mounded peaches in the pie dish. Then we were ready for the top crust.
    This one has to stay together a little better than the bottom because we have to lift it, he told me. Still, it was always easier to add more water than take some away.
    I looked over at my mother again. She was looking at Frank. He must have felt it because he looked up then himself, back at her.
    Funny the way advice works, he said. A person might have been gone from your life twenty-five years. Certain things they said just stay in your head.
    Never overhandle the dough . Another of his gram’s sayings.
    He got that one wrong, however, he told us. Thought she meant money. That was a joke, he explained. We might not have known because one thing about Frank, the muscles on his face, that pulled so tightly under the skin of his jaw, seemed never to have formed what you could call a smile.
    We rolled out the top crust, also on wax paper. Only this time there was no way a person could turn the pie dish over on the dough, because there were peaches in it now. We’d have to lift that circle of dough off the sheet and flip it on top of the pie. For a split second there, our flaky crust, with only the minimum amount of ice water holding it together, would be suspended in the air. Hesitate in the act of lifting it and turning, and the whole thing would fall apart. Flip too fast, and you could miss your mark.
    A person needed a steady hand, but also, a steady heart. This is a moment about faith and commitment, Frank said.
    Up until now, Frank and I had worked alone, just the two of us. My mother had only been watching. Now he put a hand on her shoulder.
    He said, I think you can handle this, Adele.
    Some time back—I could no longer remember when this wasn’t true—my mother’s hands had begun to tremble. Picking up a coin from the counter, or chopping vegetables—on the rare occasions, like today, when we’d have some kind of fresh produce to cut up—her hand would sometimes shake so violently on the knife, she’d set down whatever it was she’d been cutting up and say, Soup sounds good tonight. What do you think, Henry?
    Times she wore lipstick—rare times we went out—the outlines didn’t always match her lips exactly right. It was the reason she’d mostly given up her cello, probably. On the frets, she had a natural vibrato, but she couldn’t keep her hand steady on the bow. Something like what she’d attempted that afternoon—stitching his pants—was also a challenge. Threading a needle, impossible. I did that part.
    Now my mother stepped up alongside the counter, next to where Frank had been standing with the wine bottle that had served as our rolling pin.
    I’ll try, she said, taking the circle of dough between the fingers of her two hands, and folding it over the way Frank showed her. He was standing very close. She held her breath. The circle of dough landed just where it was supposed to, on top of the peaches.
    Perfect, honey, he said.
    Then he showed me how to pinch along the sides, to fix the top crust to the bottom one. He showed me how to brush the top with milk, and sprinkle sugar on, and pierce the dough with a fork in three places, to let the steam out. He slipped the pie into the oven.
    Forty-five minutes from now, we’ll have ourselves a pie, he said. My grandma had