Read Online The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online Page A

he said.
    I was still thinking about what Mr. Jervis said. People out looking for the escaped prisoner. From the newspaper, I knew they’d got roadblocks on the highway. Helicopters over by the dam, where someone thought they spotted a man matching the description, only now they were saying he had a scar over one eye and possibly a tattoo on his neck of a knife or a Harley, something along those lines. Now was the moment Frank was going to take out a gun, or a knife maybe, and wrap his lean, muscled arm around my mother’s neck, that he’d just finished admiring, and press the knife against her skin, and guide us out to the car.
    We were his ticket across state lines. That was the story. I’d watched enough episodes of Magnum, P.I. to get it. Only then Frank turned around to face us, and he was holding a knife.
    These peaches, he said, looking even more serious than before. If we don’t put them to use soon, they’re goners.
    What did you have in mind? my mother said. There was a sound to her voice I could not remember ever hearing. She was laughing, not the way a person does if you tell them a joke, but more how it is when they’re just in a good mood and feeling happy.
    I’m going to make us a peach pie, like my grandmother did it, he said.
    First thing, he needed a couple of bowls. One to make the crust. One for the filling.
    Frank peeled the peaches. I cut them up.
    Filling is easy, Frank said. What I want to talk about is crust.
    You could tell, the way he reached for his bowl, that this man had made more than a few pies in his life.
    First off, you need to keep your ingredients as cool as possible, 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