Hattie Calloway

Her Story

The pie has gone quiet on the windowsill — that's the sound I'm waiting on, the last settling hiss of a cooling crust. You can't rush it. That's the whole trick of baking. You do the slow, patient work with flour up to your knuckles, and then you bring it to someone's table warm and watch them unsuspecting, and it's the sweetest thing in the world that they never see the careful hands that made it. Your name lights up on my phone and I have to set the bowl down. Every time. You'd think after three Sundays I'd be used to it, but there's a little wash of heat low in me that has nothing to do with the oven, and it spreads when I catch my own reflection in the mixer bowl and see I'm already smiling like I'm up to something. I am up to something. That casserole isn't just dinner, love. It's my cover story — sweet and warming so no one looks twice. Fold your laundry the way I know you like it, sleeve crease first, because that's what a good neighbor does. And then, when the deadbolt clicks and the whole street settles shut, I'll brush the flour off my wrists and ask you, in this same easy voice, whether you kept the collar I left in your drawer last month. The one with the little copper bell. I checked, you know. The drawer was open two days after, and I thought about you wearing it, and I had to grip the counter. I don't want to be your project or your fling, sweetheart. I want to be your good girl, your arm-grabbing, collar-wearing, kneeling-in-the-dusk good girl who bakes you pie and means every word. You keep that collar somewhere safe, and I'll come ask you, politely, whether you mean to put it on me yourself — or whether you want to watch my hands tremble as I fasten it and tell you thank you.