The Shepherd's Pie Bid

The pie auction happens every February at the Shady Rest Motel, out at the edge of the sheep country, and I have been going to it for the twenty-eight years since Saoirse and I moved to the district, which is longer than I have been going to anything else voluntarily except my marriage, which is going on twenty-eight years now. Anna runs it, and Anna is the wife of a guy I used to work with at the tech office in town, and every year she sets up folding tables in the motel's fenced lot next to the kidney-shaped pool that nobody has swum in since the nineties, and she strings up lights, and she puts a hand-lettered sign on the gate that says PIE AUCTION, ROOF FUND, and the whole thing raises money for the community hall roof, which has needed a new roof since roughly the dawn of time.

The way it works is that people bake pies, or buy pies, or in a few notorious cases donate pies, and Anna auctions them one at a time with a little spiel about each one, and the money goes in a coffee tin, and at the end of the night she counts the coffee tin out loud on a card table while everyone pretends not to watch. There is also a barbecue, and there is beer in a washtub, and there are maybe a hundred and fifty people, which for our district is a crowd. The motel itself is low and long and painted a color I would call tired yellow, and its neon sign flickers NO VACANCY all night even though half the units are dark, which Anna says the owner refuses to fix because the flicker is now tradition.

Saoirse is fifty-three, a former librarian, and her whole deal at the auction, every year, is that she bids on the most unusual pie no matter what it is, and she has won some genuinely alarming things over the years. She won a curry pie one year that made us both humble. She won a pie made with mussels, which I still think about at bad moments. She won a pie one year that was, and I am not exaggerating, a meat pie with a whole boiled egg in the middle of it like some kind of Scottish threat, and she ate a slice of every one of them, sitting across from me at one of those folding tables, daring me with her eyes to say something.

I am Rex, I am fifty-four, I run projects for a tech company that I mostly attend over video calls from a spare room with a good view of paddocks, and I will tell you plainly that the thing I love most about my wife, out of a long list of things, is that after twenty-eight years she still does stuff like bidding forty dollars for a mussel pie just to see what happens. Most people settle down. Saoirse escalated.

* * *

This year it was a warm evening, the kind where the light goes gold on the hills and the Southern Alps behind them go pink, and we had claimed a table near the fence with our friends the Dunmores, and I had a beer from the washtub and Saoirse had cider, and Anna got up on a milk crate with a clipboard and started the auction the way she always does, by thanking everyone and then immediately roasting someone. She roasted the vicar over his pavlova pie. She roasted a farmer named Angus over a pie that she said tasted like the inside of a wool shed, and Angus stood up and took a bow, so it was that kind of crowd.

Then she got to lot nineteen, and her voice changed, the way it does when she has been saving something.

"Right," she said, holding up a pie in a tin foil dish that looked, I will be honest, completely ordinary, browned top, little vents cut in it, nothing unusual. "Lot nineteen. Mutton and apple pie. Baked by Elliot, the new-ish shepherd, two properties over, been here five years now so not new, but you know what I mean. And here's the thing about lot nineteen."

She turned the dish around and there was a piece of paper tucked under the foil edge, and Anna held it up and read it out.

It said, in handwriting that was surprisingly neat for a man who presumably wrote with the wind blowing: "Mutton and apple, recipe from my grandmother. Winner also gets a picnic at my place, pie included, I'll do the rest. Bring an appetite."

There was a laugh from the crowd, the kind of laugh that has some interest in it, and Saoirse turned to me slowly with an expression I have learned to recognize, and I said, "No!"

"I didn't say anything," she said.

"You made a noise."

"I made a noise of appreciation for charity," she said, and she winked at me, one of her slow winks, and turned back toward the crate with her whole body, which I have also learned to recognize, because Saoirse does not turn her whole body toward things she is not going to do.

Elliot was standing over by the barbecue, and I will describe him so you have the picture. He is forty-two, tall in that way sheep farmers get from lifting things and walking hills, quiet, the kind of man who answers a question three seconds after you ask it because he has actually thought about it. He moved out here five years back after a divorce, bought or rented a converted wool shed on the property two over from the motel, and mostly keeps to himself except that he turns up at everything and helps with everything and says about twelve words a night. He heard Anna read out his note and went slightly red around the ears and looked at his boots, and I remember thinking, fair enough, the man made a joke and now the whole district is laughing kindly at him, welcome to the district.

"Who'll start me at ten dollars," Anna said, "for lot nineteen, the pie and the picnic, and no, I don't know what 'I'll do the rest' means either, I asked him and he just smiled."

The laughing got louder at that, and somebody called out five dollars, and Anna said ten or go home, and a woman from the tennis club took it at ten, and then Saoirse's hand went up.

"Fifteen," she said.

I looked at her. "Fifteen dollars for a picnic at a stranger's wool shed," I said.

"It's for the roof," she said, watching Anna. "The roof doesn't judge."

"Tennis club says twenty," Anna called, and the tennis club woman raised her glass at us.

"Twenty-five," said Saoirse.

Now, here is where I made my mistake, which I will own, because it is an important part of the story. I leaned over and said, quietly, into her ear, "I'll outbid you, you know I will, thirty," and I put my hand up, and I said "Thirty," out loud, mostly as a joke, because the idea of Rex the tech executive buying a picnic from a shepherd to spite his own wife was, I thought, funny.

Saoirse turned her head and looked at me, and she was grinning, and it was the grin, the full one, the one she has used on me exactly when she is about to do something and wants me to know it is happening whether I like it or not.

"Thirty-five," she said.

"Saoirse," I said.

"Forty," said the tennis club woman, who was now in it too, god help us.

"Fifty," said Saoirse, and there were whistles from the Dunmore table, and Anna on her crate was enjoying herself in a way I would describe as completely shameless.

I put my hand up. "Fifty-five," I said, and I still thought I was joking.

Saoirse looked at me again, and this time she didn't grin, she just looked, with one eyebrow up, the way she does when she is asking me a question without words, and the question was something like, do you actually want to win this, or do you want to see what your wife does, and I will admit to you that some part of me, some part I had not consulted, went quiet and curious.

Then she turned back to the front and said, "One hundred."

The crowd made a noise. Anna made a noise. The tennis club woman sat down like she had been dismissed.

"One hundred dollars," Anna repeated, savoring it. "Do I hear one-ten? Anybody? Going once for one hundred, going twice," and she looked around at all hundred and fifty of us, and nobody moved, including me, and I could not have told you why I did not move, except that my hand stayed down and my heart was doing something complicated.

"Sold," said Anna, whacking the clipboard with her hand, "one hundred dollars to Saoirse, for a mutton and apple pie and a picnic at a wool shed, and Saoirse, love, I want you to know the roof of the hall thanks you personally."

There was laughing and a bit of clapping, and Saoirse got up and walked to the card table with her cider, completely calm, and paid Anna cash out of her handbag, counted out into Anna's palm like she had planned the amount in advance, which knowing her she had. Then she came back to the table and sat down and took a drink and looked at me over the rim of the glass.

"You went to sixty in your head," she said. "I saw it."

"I went to fifty-five out loud."

"And then your hand stayed down," she said, and she patted my knee under the table, once, and left it there. "Thank you, Rex."

"For what, exactly."

"For not saving me," she said, and ate a chip.

Meanwhile Elliot had come over to collect his situation, because Anna had waved him across the lot, and he stood at the end of our table holding his foil dish with the pie in it, which was apparently now legally Saoirse's, and he said, "So, ah. Picnic. When suits."

"Saturday," said Saoirse, immediately, no pause at all, and I choked on my beer.

"Saturday," Elliot repeated, in the tone of a man writing it down mentally. "I'll sort a time. Fair warning, my place is a wool shed with a kitchen in one corner of it, and the view does most of the work."

"We've got a good view too," Saoirse said, "but the pie is what we paid for," and she smiled at him, and he smiled back, a small one, and went off with his dish, and I sat there with beer on my chin and a wife who had just bought herself a shepherd's picnic for a hundred dollars in front of the entire district, including my colleague's wife, including the vicar, including everyone I would see at the hardware store for the next decade.

"You know everyone thinks this is a date," I said.

"Everyone would be right," said Saoirse. "It's a pie date.