Scrappy Summer (4 page)

“Whoever has a van or a truck. You know, someone with the space. It changes every
year,” she said, cutting into the tip of the slice with her fork.

“Who was it this year?” Paige asked.

“The Burkholders,” she said, and Paige looked at Sheila with a knowing gleam in her
eye.

Macy took a bite of the pie and promptly spit it back out onto her plate. Her face
turned red, and she coughed. Sheila handed her a glass of water and a napkin.

“Good Lord! Are you trying to kill me?” she squealed.

“No,” Paige said. “Of course not. We just wanted you to take a bite of the pie you
destroyed!”

“What? Well, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You all are just plain crazy.
I’ll show myself to the door!”

But Annie beat her to it. “Not so fast, Macy.”

“What do you want from me?” Macy said, looking up at the tall, dark, and beautiful
Annie.

“We want you to admit what you did.” Paige came up beside Annie.

Macy crossed her arms. “What are you talking about?”

“The pie. Admit that you sprinkled it with cumin before giving it to the judges,”
Annie said.

“I did no such thing!”

“C’mon,” Sheila said. “Admit it. Nothing can be done about it now. DeeAnn’s out of
the competition. It won’t matter at this point. How did you do it? Why?”

“Look. I’d never do such a thing,” she said. “Not that I haven’t been angry with her.
I really needed that job, and I am a damned good baker—one that doesn’t mix up her
spices, by the way. I don’t need to resort to such tactics. I’m going to win that
pie competition, fair and square!”

She turned to leave, but Annie was still in her way. She shoved her with one big push,
and Annie stumbled. In the meantime, Macy escaped to the driveway. Without her scrapbooking
supplies.

“It’s shocking that people take this pie competition so seriously,” Annie said after
a few minutes. “This feels kind of surreal to me.”

“I hope we didn’t scare her too much. She seemed kind of nervous and twitchy,” Vera
said. “But you can’t go around sabotaging people’s pie.”

The evening left the Cumberland Creek croppers scrambling for another plan, all of
them gathered in Sheila’s basement. All of them, of course, except for DeeAnn.

DeeAnn sometimes scrapbooked alone at home. Oh, she enjoyed the weekly crops and so
on, but sometimes she didn’t get much done, because she was too busy chitchatting
with her friends. So occasionally she sat at her own kitchen table and caught up.

After the last crop, she’d thought about the things in her life that mattered. Truth
was, she was not attached to most things, like Paige was. She had inherited all those
old dishes and stories about them. What a fabulous legacy project for Randy to have
someday.

DeeAnn thought of all her scrapbooks as a legacy for her daughters. But when it came
to things, precious few items existed in her life. But she did have boxes of their
baby things and some precious toys that she couldn’t part with. Jacob had wanted to
throw away everything. They’d argued about it over the years. He’d said there was
just no room in his garage for all the stuff she wanted to keep.

“Baloney, Jacob! That’s what garages are for!” she’d told him.

“Believe it or not, DeeAnn, garages are for cars and tools, not boxes of toys and
baby clothes.” But eventually, he’d come around. She was not above using food, blackmail,
or sex to get what she wanted from her husband.

So she had decided to photograph and catalog each item in a scrapbook. The first few
photos were of the clothes the girls were both brought home in from the hospital.
At the time she had journaled a bit about how she felt during those first few days
after she’d brought them home, so she tore out the pages of the journal she’d used
and glued them on the scrapbook page, next to the photos of the outfits. Her girls
would now know what she had thought about during the first few days of their lives.
Talk about a legacy.

She loved the torn-paper technique. Several places sold items to help you tear the
paper, but she liked to tear it herself. So satisfying to rip that paper. It gave
it such an interesting edge and texture, which added depth to the page. And she really
liked using those original pages that had her own writing on them.

Each one of the girls had special pillows, which she had photographed. Karen had a
Winnie-the-Pooh pillow, and Tracy had a pillow shaped like a duck. Both girls had
used the pillows up until they were teenagers.

She turned the radio on and grabbed a can of diet soda and sat down to work.

Paige often teased DeeAnn about her kitchen, so immaculate and done in a strawberry
theme. Her kitchen curtains, towels, pot holders, and even burner covers had strawberries
on them, as did her everyday dishes. Red was her favorite color, and she loved strawberries.
Why not decorate her favorite room in the house with bright, cheery strawberries?
Paige could laugh all she wanted. As if she were one to talk, with all that dark and
flowery Victorian decor in her home.

DeeAnn switched the station to NPR and listened to
Fresh Air.
Martin Scorsese spoke about the language of cinema. He was talking about his obsession
with it, about light and movement. Pieces of time. The need to capture movement.

She sat back and looked over her scrapbooking pages, and it struck her that the same
held true for scrapbooking. It was an attempt to capture memories, yes, but also to
capture who we were. Our essence. The essence of those whom we loved.

Well, the new scrapbook was coming right along. She was pleased that she’d gotten
so many pages done, until she saw what time it was. Eleven o’clock! She needed to
get to bed. Bakery hours started at four.

The next day Sheila spotted Rachel Burkholder at the merry-go-round.

“Good afternoon, Rachel. How are you?”

“Fine,” she said. “Just listening to the music and watching the kids. You?”

It was one of those August days that were so humid that walking felt like swimming.

“I’m just waiting on Steve. He’s over at the tractor pull again. Will you be at the
church tonight?”

“Yes. I’m there every Wednesday night,” Rachel said. “I’m in charge of the food bank,
and we collect on Wednesday nights. If you have a donation, we’d be mighty grateful.”

“I might have something. I’ll see you later.”

Some of Sheila’s favorite people were Old Order Mennonites. But some of her least
favorite people were also Old Order Mennonites. And Rachel was one of them. She had
argued publicly with Sheila once about the sin of photography.

“The Lord says to be humble in all things,” she’d said to Sheila, who was at a craft
fair, trying to sell some scrapbooking supplies.

“What does that have to do with scrapbooking?” Sheila had asked.

“It has to do with the photos,” she’d said. “You know how we feel about them. ’Tis
a sin.”

“Well, I think you can believe whatever you want,” Sheila said, trying to be as polite
as possible, since a crowd of people was mulling around, looking over her scrapbooking
materials. And Rachel was loud.

“Has nothing to do with what I believe. The Bible says you shall not make for yourself
an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the
waters below.”

“I’m sorry, Rachel. I disagree with your interpretation. Capturing my family’s memories
on film and paper doesn’t feel at all like a sin to me. In fact, it feels quite the
opposite. It has a lot of meaning to me,” she said, feeling her face heat.

“Humph. What do you know?” She had then turned and said something in German, waving
Sheila off and scaring off a few of her customers.

And now what did she have against DeeAnn? Why would she put cumin in DeeAnn’s pie?
Of course, she still wasn’t certain that Macy was innocent. But if she was, why would
Rachel do it, other than she really wanted to win that competition this year—even
though she’d won it for the past three years? Talk about mean!

Sheila dialed Vera’s number.

“It’s me,” she said.

“And?”

“She’s going to be at the church tonight.”

“Okay,” Vera said. “Project Food Bank is on. I’ll alert the others.”

That evening Sheila, Paige, Vera, and Annie gathered in front of the Cumberland Creek
First Mennonite Church, all of them with donations for the food bank.

“It’s probably just about ready to close,” Vera said.

“Yes. Let’s go,” Sheila said, picking up her bag of canned goods.

They went into the church by way of the side door, which entered into a hallway leading
to the kitchen, where the donations were taken. A huge metal table overflowed with
paper sacks of food: canned goods and boxed food.

“Just what poor people need,” Annie said. “Cheap macaroni and cheese.”

“Humph,” Vera said.

“Hello. Is anybody here?” Sheila yelled.

“Yes, I’m back here,” Rachel said. “Back in the pantry.”

They followed the sound of her voice, but only after placing their bags on the table,
and not before Sheila whispered, “Perfect.”

When they entered the tiny room, Sheila was shocked by the piles of food. All of it
was neatly organized. Here was the fresh food. Bread. Fruit. Vegetables. Bags of it
ready to go.

The only light coming into the room came from the window, from the setting sun.

“Oh, you made it, I see.” Rachel looked up at Sheila from her work.

“Well, I told you I’d try to make it,” Sheila replied.

“We left our donations on the table. That okay?” Vera said.

“It’s fine,” she said and went back to her work.

Annie shut the door.

“Keep the door open, please,” Rachel said. “I need to hear if anybody else comes in.”

“Oh, I think they will find you,” Vera said.

“Just give us a minute,” Sheila said, concentrating on keeping her tone light.

Rachel looked up at them and set down her marker. “A minute for what? I don’t have
time for chitchat.”

“I think you should make the time,” Vera said, with a note of menace in her voice.
Just a note. Vera was way too polite to be too menacing. But she didn’t like Rachel,
who had also thought that dancing was a sin.

Rachel looked at Annie, who was standing in front of the door with her arms crossed.
“What’s this about, then?”

“It’s about DeeAnn’s pie,” Sheila said.

“
Pftt,”
she huffed. “What do I know about that, except that it made about half the judges
sick?”

“Someone laced it with cumin,” Vera said.

“Someone,” Sheila said and crossed her arms.

Rachel’s stern face cracked into a fake-looking smile. “Are you suggesting that I—”

“We talked to Macy,” Vera said. “She says she didn’t do it.”

“Look, this is a bit daft. Do you really think one of us wants to win that competition
so bad that we’d lace her pie with cumin? I don’t need to resort to such tactics.
I’m a good baker. I’ve won every year for three years in a row,” she said, with more
than a slight boasting note to her voice.

“Macy said that she handed DeeAnn’s pie to you and that you took it to the fire hall.
Is that true?” Vera said.

“Yes, it’s true,” she said.

“What did you do to DeeAnn’s pie?” Paige said. “You might as well admit it. She can’t
win at this point. What did you do to that pie? How did you do it?”

Rachel’s hands went to her hips. “I didn’t touch the thing, except to deliver it to
the transport. And what’s more, I don’t appreciate the accusation. Well, I never!”

“You can say that again,” Paige mumbled under her breath.

“Wait,” Annie said. “Did you transport it yourself ?”

“No. My second cousin Ruth has a van. She transported it. Now, I’d thank you to leave,”
she said. “I’m busy.”

“We’ll leave when we get some answers,” Vera said, crossing her arms.

“I’m sorry, ladies. I don’t have any for you,” she said and went back to her work.

The group stood and looked at one another. Now what?

“Do you need some help with that?” Annie asked.

“Not from the likes of you. Just please get out,” she said.

Annie picked up the box, anyway, and placed it on the counter for her, then shrugged
and opened the door. As Vera walked out of the room, she did so with a ballet spin
and a flourish of her hands and glared at Rachel.

They then gathered on the sidewalk.

“That just made me feel awful,” Annie said.

“Don’t feel too bad, Annie. She’s a harsh, judgmental woman. Believe me,” Vera said.

“We may have been a little hard on her,” Sheila said, “but the woman is difficult.”

Paige shrugged. “You reap what you sow. Back to business. What next?”

“Let’s just go home,” Annie said.

“Ruth Ramsey?” Sheila said to Paige, ignoring Annie. “Is she in the competition?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll check on it. Hold on,” Paige said, pulling out her smart phone.
“We all left the competition halfway through. I’m just not certain about who is in
it.”

Mr. and Mrs. Gregory passed by on their evening walk and mumbled a hello to the ladies.

“But Ruth Ramsey? She’s so quiet,” Sheila said.

“You know what they say. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch,” Annie said. “It’s
getting late. How will we manage to reach her?”

“Ruth? She works down at Marino’s every night,” Sheila said.

“Let’s go,” Paige said.

Annie grimaced, looking as if Marino’s was the worst place on earth.

“What’s wrong?” Shelia asked.

“Nothing. It’s just that I’m not fond of Marino’s. It’s where the local cops hang
out,” Annie said.

Paige shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Sheila said. “We’re just trying to help DeeAnn.”

But Annie frowned.

When they walked into Marino’s, the place smelled of burgers and beer.

“I’m hungry,” Paige said. “Let’s get a table.”

The place was dimly lit. A group of men at the bar laughed about something on the
television. A young couple held hands and shared fries in the corner.