Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  The best part of the shoot, as with all of the segments we taped for the show, was that the culmination of our time there led to eating the pie we had watched being made. As if we were pie judges, Jose brought us each a slice of his apple pie and waited for Janice and me to give him our verdict. “My God, this is good,” I mumbled as the warm pie filled my mouth. “Thumbs up, Jose.” He flashed a huge, relieved smile. Rodrigo, the other baker from behind the scenes, came out with slices of boysenberry and banana cream, one of each for Janice and me. I couldn’t have chosen a favorite because they were all equally, phenomenally, heavenly good.

  People always ask me how I can eat so much pie and stay so thin. I answer, “For one thing, I don’t eat that much pie. But I also exercise.” The Apple Pan’s pie was so good, however, I wouldn’t be able to live nearby and still keep my shape. I would want to eat so much of it that no amount of exercise could burn off the calories I would consume.

  After a very long day, we parked in front of Nan’s Venice Beach rental house. We had one more job to do before we were finished with the shoot: record the voice-over for the sizzle reel, the two-minute promotional tape we would use to try to sell our show. We sat in Nan’s living room, her husband, Steve, across from me, watching and listening, while Nan topped off my glass with a splash of cabernet.

  “Let’s try it again,” Janice said. “Slower this time.”

  I took a breath, let it out, and recited my lines for the third time. “Pie is comfort. Pie builds community. Pie heals. Pie can change the world. My name is Beth Howard. I’m a pie baker and I’ve always believed that pie can change the world. Now I have to put my theory to the test as I attempt to heal from the unexpected death of my forty-three-year-old husband. I’m packing up the RV my husband left behind and hitting the American highways in search of the real healing powers of pie. Be it teaching others to make pie, exchanging recipes and tips with other pie bakers and pie lovers, visiting orchards to pick fruit for filling or seeking out the perfect slice, the journey, no matter how bittersweet, is sure to be a delicious one. So grab a fork and join me for the ride.”

  I pulled back from the microphone, sat back in my armchair and took a swig of wine.

  “That was better. Let’s do it one more time. Try not to make it sound so forced.”

  I swallowed my drink, took another breath and leaned into the microphone again. “Pie is comfort. Pie builds community. Pie heals. Pie can change the world.”

  When I got to the end, Janice took off her headphones and turned off her recorder. “I think we have what we need.”

  Steve nodded, the ice cubes clinking in his Scotch glass. “I agree. That last one sounded the best.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Can we please go to dinner now? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since those four pieces of pie I had for breakfast.”

  I drove Janice—and all her camera gear and the twenty-seven hours of digital tape we shot—to the Los Angeles airport. We had expressed our gratitude and said our goodbyes the night before, over an expensive dinner with Nan and her husband. So in lieu of tearing up over the end of our Big Pie Adventure, Janice complained the whole way about how much weight she had gained during our two weeks together. “I’m going to have to go on a diet when I get back to Jersey,” she claimed.

  “First of all,” I told her, “you really didn’t have that much pie. You only had one bite of coconut cream the entire time. You only had one full slice of pie at The Apple Pan—it was so good, I can’t believe you didn’t eat more. Especially considering I had four. And you didn’t eat any yesterday.” Then, I said to her with a teasing grin, “Don’t blame pie.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  After Janice left and the shoot was over, I had to decide what to do next. It was early February and I had been gone from Portland for two months. The time away and all that concentrated focus on the TV show—combined with Janice’s continuous company and laughter—was good for me. To suddenly go back to full-time grieving was not a pleasant option. I didn’t have to do it. I could have stayed in motion. I could have gone anywhere in the RV. But I had to get my thyroid checked—er, the place my thyroid used to be. So once again, I let my medical needs direct my decision. I returned to Portland in The Beast with a very full load: Team Terrier, my new “Honk If You Love Pie” and “Free Pie” signs and all of my belongings from the L.A. storage locker. With all of the TV show activity, I had almost forgotten the original reason I made the journey down there—to collect my stuff.

  Back in October—on October 26, to be exact—my endocrinologist, Dr. Vanek, had sent me to the basement of the Oregon Health and Sciences University Hospital. There, in the cavern of the medical castle, a round man resembling a sinister Santa Claus unlocked a lead box. He pulled out a glass vile, handed it to me and ran out of the room. Just before he slammed the door behind him, he said, “Once you open the vile, swallow the pill as fast as you can.”

  Alone and abandoned, I unscrewed the lid of the glass cylinder and popped the radioactive iodine pill into my mouth. That is how simple it was to kill my thyroid gland. The thyroid is the only gland in the body that absorbs iodine, so making the chemical element radioactive is an efficient, surgery-free way to deal with a misbehaving body part. All I had to do after washing the pill down with a cup of water was wait for the thyroid to die its slow, painless, invisible death.

  In a way, saying goodbye to that small-but-important gland in my neck felt like more loss upon loss. I didn’t have an intimate relationship with it, it didn’t call me and email every day like Marcus did, I had never had sex with it, but there was still something sad about it. The three-day quarantine in my apartment also made for some melancholy moments—even if I didn’t want human contact, the idea that I was forbidden from it made the isolation seem like punishment. As if my grief wasn’t repellent enough, now I was contaminated. (Apparently my dogs were immune to the radioactive fallout as they were allowed to stay with me.) In the scheme of things, it was no worse than being housebound with a common cold. And compared to losing Marcus, letting go of my thyroid was nothing.

  It takes three to four months for the radioactivity to kill the thyroid’s active tissue—causing the gland, along with my grapefruit-size goiter, to shrivel up—so my February return to Portland was well timed for my doctor’s check up.

  I could never seem to remember the exact date I met Marcus—I mean, I remembered meeting him, of course, but was perpetually confused as to whether it was on September 29 or 30. But the reason I couldn’t forget October 26 is because while I was swallowing my little pill, my youngest brother, Patrick, in Seattle, was under a knife and scalpel having his left testicle—and the malignant tumor attached to it—removed.

  This is why life is not fair: I was childless and newly widowed with no job, no real obligations (financial or otherwise), no mortgage, no car payments—basically, no pressing need to stick around on this planet except to care for my dogs—and after my treatment I received a clean bill of health. My brother was forty-two, married with four kids under the age of sixteen, with a successful career, a family to feed, baseball games to coach, dance recitals to attend, a big lawn to mow—he was greatly needed here—and after his treatment, he received news that the cancer had spread. Vascular invasion, they called it. For the past two months, they proceeded to pump him full of poison chemicals until he was so sick he couldn’t leave his house, let alone his bed. If only we had learned about the apple cure sooner; I would have sent him a hundred cases from Alison’s Oak Glen orchard.

  Patrick’s final chemo treatment coincided with my return to Portland. He called me, excited with the news that his doctor had deemed him “clear” enough to remove the easy-access chemo port that had been sewn into his chest. This was cause for celebration, and a good excuse to visit him in Seattle.

  I left The Beast behind and packed Team Terrier in the MINI Cooper for the three-and-a-half-hour drive north. I had missed driving my zippy, little car. But the contrast going f
rom the twenty-four-foot-long RV to a six-foot-long sports car was extreme.

  My brother’s house lies in the eastern suburbs of Seattle in a town with its own lake called Sammamish. I drove to the end of his cul de sac, where the branches of the tall cedar trees wrapped the neighborhood in a safety net, and saw three of his four kids playing outside. Eleni was on her bike, bundled up in a jacket and boots; Zach and Ben were playing basketball in the driveway, dressed in T-shirts and shorts. They came running like puppies when I got out of the car.

  “Hi, Aunt Beth,” they all said at once, lining up for a quick squeeze.

  “Where’s Jack?” asked Ben.

  “That’s a good question.” My dogs knew and liked the neighborhood so well they had already escaped from the car and were racing around on the huge lawn. “Oh, there he is. He’s already found a stick.” And off the trio scampered, to play with the dogs.

  Patrick was inside. I let myself in and found him in the kitchen. Except that it wasn’t him. It was half of him, or what was left of him. He had wasted away to a bony, gaunt shell, having lost what looked like half of his body weight. And all of his hair. He was bald with no eyebrows. There was not a hint of hair on his face, arms or anywhere. His skin was grey and his eyes were sunken in their sockets. Even Marcus lying in his casket looked healthier than this.

  “Hi, Pat. It’s good to see you,” I said as we hugged. What I was thinking was, “It’s good to see you alive.” I didn’t tell him how shocked I was by his appearance, and that from the way he looked, how scared I was that he wouldn’t survive. I had seen him since his surgery, sometime around Thanksgiving, when he still looked robust, but I hadn’t seen him since his chemo.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. Ah, my generous brother, unconcerned with himself, was kind enough to inquire as to my well-being—which, even though I didn’t have a life-threatening disease, had been tenuous these past six months.

  The question was easier for me to answer this time, and the words came out quickly and genuinely.

  “I’m doing a lot better.” Compared to him and his situation, I was suddenly aware—and ashamed—I had been very self-involved in my own grief. There were other people in the world suffering far greater tragedy and loss than me. Every single day people were dying for all kinds of reasons, sometimes lots of people at once, sometimes because of horrific accidents or heinous crimes, sometimes because of heart conditions or…cancer. I had witnessed the breadth of others’ losses during the pie shoot, and now I was staring at death again in the face—of my own flesh and blood.

  Before I had beat myself up to a bloody pulp for being a bad and selfish person, Susan’s sweet voice interrupted my thoughts: “You have a right to your emotions, and to experience your grief.” She had engrained this into me over the course of our many sessions. Before Marcus died, I was capable of feeling sadness, not for myself but for all the cruelty of the world.

  “We call that Weltschmerz,” Marcus had told me once. For as much as I complained about learning his language, I was impressed by how complicated emotions could be summed up in one German word. “World pain,” my husband explained. “It’s when you feel overwhelmed by thinking about all of life’s problems and suffering.”

  I didn’t currently have my usual capacity to take on the emotions for the rest of the world’s issues, but I could still show my support and love to my brother.

  “Hey, I recognize that shirt,” I said. Patrick was wearing Marcus’s blue-and-white-striped dress shirt. The stripes went in a diagonal direction, giving it a distinct design. My eyes followed the shirt farther down to the familiar brown wool cuffed trousers. “Oh, and the pants, too.” I managed a bittersweet smile. To see him in Marcus’s clothes was one thing, to see that the clothes had once fit Patrick perfectly and were now hanging loosely on his body was another. “I’m so glad you’re getting good use out of his stuff.”

  The next morning, Team Terrier and I walked the kids to their school-bus stop. There is no better way to start your day than to watch a wide-eyed, innocent, bright, beautiful, nine-year-old girl skipping down the street with your dogs chasing after her.

  After the bus stop, I drove Patrick to downtown Seattle. I dropped him off at his office on my way to do some pie research. I had not forgotten; I had a purpose now. Janice was taking our footage back to her New Jersey studio to edit and I was pressing ahead, looking beyond our original California radius for pie stories, in case we really could sell this show as a series.

  With my MINI idling, I watched Patrick—the back of his newly bald head, his trench coat flapping in the wind, his briefcase weighing heavy in his hand—as he disappeared through the doors of the high-rise. As the doors closed behind him, the knife that had been wedged in my heart for the past six months twisted and gouged its way in even deeper. Please, God, I do not want to lose him, too.

  The Seattle Pie Company sits in the middle of a peninsula in Seattle’s northwest neighborhood of Magnolia. The residential area, where rows of tidy houses line manicured streets, is quiet, except for the occasional ship horn announcing the departure of an Alaska-bound fishing boat. Set just slightly apart and alone from the village’s cluster of boutiques and main grocery store, the pie company makes a statement of independence and humility, and offers free parking. Its interior, a simple and plain Scandinavian design, seems to be intentional, so as to let the enormous red display case packed full with whole pies be the focal point.

  Pies, row after row of pies, were covered in mountains of crumble topping, giant clumps of brown sugar and butter weighing down thick and juicy beds of raspberries, marionberries, strawberries, apples and combinations thereof. The scent of more pies baking in the shop’s oven was so powerful the longshoremen working on the cargo ships a few blocks away could probably get a whiff.

  I recognized the woman behind the counter from her picture on their website. Alyssa Lewis, who owned the place with her husband, was even more adorable than her photo. Young and blonde with a welcoming smile and earthy presence, seeing her standing next to those pies made me think I was at a county fair and not in an urban metropolis. The sign above her head proclaimed Voted Seattle’s Best Pies’, but Alyssa could also have been voted “Seattle’s Best-Looking Pie Baker.”

  I was feeling very low and didn’t have the energy to introduce myself or explain my pie show project. So I just ordered a Swedish pancake and took my laptop over to a table by the window to update my blog and wait for my breakfast to arrive.

  I tried to write, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my brother. He was so brave and positive. He was not like his big sister. While I continued to sob and wail over Marcus, Patrick donned his suit and tie every day (or Marcus’s shirts and trousers), each morning packing lunches for himself and all the kids. He was dragging his weakened, chemo-poisoned body to work to earn the money to pay for the house, the soccer/basketball/baseball/swim team fees, the dance lessons, the soon-to-come college tuitions, the health insurance. While I continued to languish in my grief, my brother was busy fighting the greatest battle of his life. And in spite of how sick he looked, he was actually winning.

  My brother, the mighty warrior (and former football star), showed me I needed to stop focusing on the negative. I was fixating on the pallor of his skin, the sunken-ness of his eyes, the hairlessness of his body and the fear of death, but what I needed to concentrate on was his spirit—and his bright, optimistic, willful, unstoppable strength.

  Likewise, I also needed to quit obsessing about Marcus’s death and appreciate the time I had with him—the joy, the adventures, the sex, the motorcycle trips in Italy and France, living abroad, learning about him, experiencing his culture.

  Yes, life had thrown a shit pie in my face and I was still trying to wipe its depressive mess off my cheeks. But so what? Everyone in this life gets served their share of shit pie sooner or later, including my brother. It’s just that his response to it was different.

  “Shit pie?” he had said to the news of his cancer.
“No, thanks. I’ll take a slice of determination with a scoop of hope on top.”

  I understood finally. I needed to change my order. In other words, to borrow a line from When Harry Met Sally, what I needed to say was, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

  I sat so long in the pie shop, burning up so much energy ruminating on life—and how my brother was fending off death—that I hadn’t remembered even eating the pancake. I was ready for a piece of marionberry pie. Just imagining the taste of it brightened my outlook a little. These berries grow only in the Pacific Northwest and to eat them in a pie was a special treat. I was not only hungry again, I was inspired. I was so inspired, in fact, I didn’t order a piece of pie. I bought two whole pies—one to take back to Portland, and one to deliver to my brother at his office on my way out of town.

  I bought two Desserted Island pies, a mix of berries, apples and whatever else they could fit in. It was the kind of pie that has something in it to satisfy everyone’s taste and the perfect pie for a Gemini like me who can’t make a decision when faced with too many good choices. Apple? Blueberry? Marionberry? Peach? Strawberry? How about all of them?

  When I got back to Portland, I cut a slice of the Desserted Island pie. Oh, my. It was sweet, crunchy, fruity and delicious. I texted Patrick after the first bite. How was the pie?

  He texted me back immediately with a photo of his empty pie plate on his kitchen counter. Awesome, he wrote.

  I laughed at his response. And then I took another bite. Pie may not cure cancer, but it could cure the blues.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Meanwhile, after several weeks back in Portland, doubts about spending so much time and money on the pie TV show set in. I didn’t add up the receipts from the RV road trip and the money spent on pie. I didn’t want to know. Looking back, it felt irresponsible that I had ever thought something could come of it in the first place. I had tried to sell a TV show once, teaming up with an old boyfriend to write a sitcom pilot. I was broke then, barely able to buy dog food and coffee on my meager and sporadic freelance journalist’s income, yet I had invested every spare dime I had into printing color copies of our TV show treatment. We got meetings with senior-level entertainment executives who fueled our hopes that we were about to win the Hollywood lottery, so I let paying journalism gigs slide and kept spending money I didn’t have at Kinko’s to print more bound copies to send to more TV executives. I finally broke the cycle by breaking up with the boyfriend and moving to San Francisco for the dot com job.