Pie in the Sky

The barge had been a working freight boat forty years ago, and whoever converted it never met a piece of decoration they didn't like. Paper lanterns hung off the cargo booms. Somebody had strung lights along the rail like it was Christmas in June. There was a pit crew setup on the main deck, tires and a jack and a timing board, all of it arranged around a row of restored muscle cars that gleamed like they'd been waxed by hand that morning, which knowing these people, they had been.

I'm Willa Hartley, I'm forty-three, and I've been pouring drinks at a dockside dive for long enough that I can smell a party before I see one. This one smelled like gasoline and frosting, which is a combination I hadn't come across before and probably won't again.

My husband Phillip was somewhere in the crowd carrying a pie. Not just any pie. His peach pie took a blue ribbon at the county fair two summers running, and when the auto show people announced a charity bake-off on the trophy deck, he signed up before I'd even finished reading the flyer to him.

"You realize this is a car show," I'd told him back in the kitchen a week ago.

"And this is a bake-off," he said. "They coexist."

"You're a bike courier, Phil. You deliver legal documents and the occasional burrito."

"I'm also a man with a blue ribbon," he said, and that was the end of the discussion, because once Phillip plants his feet he grows roots.

* * *

I found him near the trophy table, and I mean that literally. Somebody had lacquered a plank of driftwood, stuck it on sawhorses, and called it a trophy table. Phillip stood beside it holding his pie the way a man carries a sleeping baby through a crowded bar.

"There she is." He held it out to me. "Willa. I need a favor."

"You need me to hold your pie."

"I need you to guard my pie. There's a difference. Guarding implies threat assessment."

The crust was latticed and browned in that way that makes people ask if you bought it, which is the highest compliment in baking and an insult to the baker, and Phillip had never once gotten over that paradox. I took the tin. It was still warm through the foil.

"Why can't you hold it?"

"Because the vending machine downstairs ate my dollar." He said it the way other men announce a flat tire on the interstate. "It did it twice. I'm going down there to negotiate."

"Negotiate with a vending machine."

"It has my dollar, Willa. That makes it a matter of principle."

He kissed me on the cheek, quick, and headed for the stairs to the lower deck before I could ask what flavor of negotiation a man conducts with a machine. The pie tin sat in my hands and a woman in a pits-and-cranes shirt leaned over it immediately.

"Is that entered?" she asked.

"It is. Don't even breathe on it."

I carried it around for a while, which turned out to be good for me, because guarding a pie is a fine excuse to stand still at a party. People came by and asked questions. Who baked it, what's in it, is it for sale. A man with a handlebar mustache offered to trade me a carburetor for a slice, and I want you to know I considered it for at least four seconds before saying no.

* * *

After twenty minutes I handed the pie off to the mustache man, on strict orders and with a warning, and went looking for my husband. The stairs to the lower deck were narrow and the light down there came from a single humming tube and whatever leaked through the hatch. The galley was cramped in the way old boats are cramped, everything bolted down, everything smelling faintly of diesel. And there was Phillip, bent in front of a vending machine that looked older than both of us, a chrome-sided dinosaur with a coin slot worn shiny.

"Gimme my dollar," he was saying to it. He smacked the side of it with the flat of his hand. "You took it. I watched you take it."

"What's it got," I said, "a dollar and a half of yours now?"

"Two dollars." He didn't even turn around. "It took two. It ate the first one and when I tried again it ate the second and then it flashed a code at me like I was the problem."

"Maybe you are the problem."

"Maybe I am," he admitted, and smacked it again, gently, the way you'd pat a stubborn mule.

I stood there watching him argue with a machine, and I don't know how to explain what happened in my chest except that it started as amusement and turned into something warmer and heavier before I could do anything about it. Because I'd seen this exact posture before. Eight years together, and before that three years of knowing him, and the man has a whole vocabulary of stubbornness, and every word of it I've come to love like it's my own.

Here's the memory I keep, the one I've never said out loud to him. Six years ago, the winter after we married, I got the flu so bad I couldn't stand up without the room tilting. Phillip was there for all of it. He made soup from scratch, which he'd never done before and has barely done since, and burned the first pot and made a second one. He slept on the couch for four nights so he could hear me if I called out, and every morning he came in with water and crackers and that same stupid stubborn look, like my fever was a vending machine that had taken his dollar and he was going to stand there until it gave something back.

I never thanked him. Not properly. It's one of those things you figure you'll get to, and then the years stack up and it feels too big to bring up casually, like handing someone a gift with no occasion attached. But that night, watching him lean his forehead against the glass of a machine that had robbed him, I decided the occasion had arrived.

"Phil."

"Hold on. I think I've almost got it."

"It ate your money, honey. It's a machine. It doesn't feel shame."

"Everything feels shame if you commit to it." But he straightened up and turned, and his face was shiny with exertion and bad lighting, and he grinned at me, and my chest did the thing again. "Did you guard the pie?"

"Traded it for a carburetor."

"You didn't."

"I didn't. It's on the trophy table with two sentries and a written warning."

"Good." He turned back and pressed the buttons once more, out of spite, and the machine blinked its code at him and gave him nothing. "Two dollars. That's my coffee money for a week."

"Come here," I said. "Sit with me a minute."

The galley had a bench bolted to the wall, vinyl-covered, older than us both. He came over and dropped onto it beside me with the sigh of a man who has fought the good fight, and the space was so tight that his knee ended up against mine and stayed there.

"Everyone's upstairs," I said. "Cars and pies and lanterns. Nobody's going to come down here for an hour."

"They might come down for a soda. The machine's the only one aboard."

"Then they'll be disappointed and leave."

He looked at me then, and I watched it land on him that I wasn't talking about soda or machines or an hour of anything. His eyebrows went up a little. "Willa?"

"There's something I've been meaning to do for six years," I said. "I figured tonight. Right here. If you're not busy negotiating."

He studied me for a moment, then laughed, low, so it didn't carry up the stairs. "I'm never too busy for you. That's literally my whole schedule. You."

"Good answer." I leaned in and he met me halfway, and the kiss was slow, the kind he does when he's not in a hurry, one hand coming up to my jaw like he had all night. When we broke apart he kept his forehead against mine.

"Sorry," he said. "About the pie thing. The last three weeks it's been crust ratios at breakfast and I made you rate five batches in one Sunday and I know I've been a bore about it."

"You have been a bore about it," I said. "But I love it."

"You love the pie."

"I love the pie because it reminds me of something." I pulled back enough to see his face. "The winter I had the flu. You remember that?"

"Six years ago. You couldn't stand up. I burned a pot of soup."

"You made a second pot. You slept on the couch for four nights so you could hear me if I called. You brought me water and crackers every morning like it was your job." I took his hand. "I never said thank you. Not the real kind. And I've felt bad about it for six years, and watching you fight a vending machine for your coffee money down here, I decided tonight's the night."

His face did something complicated. "Willa, you don't owe me a thank you for that. That's just, that's