A Family History of Unfinished Pies

How it begins

In every photograph of the argument, the pie was unfinished.

Miriam found the pictures in a biscuit tin beneath the bakery counter. Christmas, 1986. Her parents' anniversary. The day her brother left. Different tables, different haircuts, the same shallow dish with its pastry waiting beside it.

Her mother stood in the doorway.

“That's not where we keep the receipts.”

“Why didn't anyone finish it?”

“The oven was unreliable.”

“For twenty years?”

Nora took off her gloves.

Outside, the winter market was being assembled in the square. Miriam had agreed to reopen the bakery until January. A trial, she had said. Her mother had heard a rescue. Her brother had heard an inheritance dispute warming up again.

The pie recipe lay in a book with a cracked spine. Ingredients, quantities, four careful instructions.

Then a blank space.

“Who wrote this?”

“Your grandmother.”

“What comes next?”

“Depends what you've got.”

Miriam looked at the photographs again.

In one, her father stood with his coat on. In another, Nora held a telephone. In the oldest, a young employee Miriam did not recognize stared directly at the camera while everyone else looked away.

“That woman?”

“Annie.”

“What happened to her?”

“She left.”

People in the family were always leaving, according to Nora. The sentence rarely included where they went or why.

Miriam set the photograph beside the recipe.

Her brother arrived carrying a new card reader and enough optimism to suggest he had not read the heating bill.

“Ready?”

“No.”

He looked between them.

“Have we started already?”

Nora reached for the tin.

Miriam put her hand over it.

“If we're reopening,” she said, “I'd like to know what we're reopening.”

In the square, someone tested the market lights. The bakery window glowed briefly, making the old counter look warmer than the room felt.

Nora sat down.

“The oven,” she said, “wasn't the problem.”