Read Online Labor Day by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online Page A

he said. Hot day like this, we have a challenge on our hands. We need to move fast, before the heat gets to them. If the phone rings when you’re making crust, you don’t pick it up. (Not that this was likely to be a problem at our house, where days went by sometimes that nobody called, unless it was my father, confirming plans for our weekly dinner.)
    As he set out the ingredients around our work area, Frank talked about his life on the farm with his grandparents. His grandmother mostly, after his grandpa’s tractor accident. She was the one who raised him from age ten on up. A tough woman, but fair. You didn’t do your chores, you knew the consequences, no discussion. Clean the barn all weekend. Simple as that.
    She had read out loud to him at night. Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Count of Monte Cristo . We didn’t have television in those days, he said, but there was no need, the way she could read out loud. She could have been on the radio.
    She had told him not to go to Vietnam. Ahead of her time, that woman understood no one was going to win that war. He thought he was going to outsmart them all. Stay in the reserves, get his G.I. bill college education. Next thing he knew he was eighteen years old, on a plane to Saigon. Got there two weeks before the start of the Tet Offensive. Of the twelve men in his platoon, seven went home in a box.
    I wanted to know if he still had his dog tags. Or souvenirs. An enemy weapon, something like that.
    I don’t need one thing to remind me of those days, he said.
     
    Frank had made enough pies in his life—none lately, but this was like riding a bicycle—that he didn’t need to measure the flour, though just for my information he said he favored starting out with three cups of flour. That way you’d have extra crust, to make a turnover, or if there was some young whippersnapper around, you could give him the dough to cut out shapes with a cookie cutter.
    He also didn’t measure the salt he put in, but he figured it to be three-quarters of a teaspoon. Piecrust is a forgiving thing, Henry, he told me. You can make all kinds of mistakes, and still come out OK, but one thing a person can never do is forget the salt. It’s like life: sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.
    One tool he wished he had, for making this crust, was his grandmother’s pastry blender. You could pick one up anyplace—we weren’t speaking of fancy gourmet shops, just a regular supermarket—but his gram’s had this wooden handle, painted green.
    First you put the shortening in the bowl with the flour and salt. Then you cut it in, using your pastry blender, he said, though in an emergency (which was what we had on our hands, evidently) a couple of forks would do.
    And about your shortening, he said. He had a few things to tell me about that. Some people use butter, for the superior flavor. Then again, nothing beats lard for contributing flakiness. This is one of the great controversies of piecrust, Henry, he said. All your life you’ll meet people of the two persuasions, and you may have about as much luck convincing the one to come over to the other side as a Democrat talking to a Republican, or vice versa.
    So which did he use? I asked. Lard or butter? Amazingly, we had lard in our pantry—though not real lard, as Frank would have preferred, but Crisco, from one time when my mother got it into her head to make potato chips and do some deep fat frying. We got about ten chips out of the deal, before she got tired and went to bed. Lucky for us now, the blue tin still sat on our shelf. Assuming Frank was not, as he might be, of the butter-crust persuasion.
    I favor both, he said, sweeping the spatula through the glossy white Crisco and dropping a dollop in the center of the bowl with the flour. The butter was important too, however, so he sent me over to the neighbors’ to borrow some. This was not the kind of thing my mother and I had ever done