I hope you like... pie.
It sure looks like... a nice pie.
— A Head Full Non-Pie Thoughts
I lived in Wanatah for eighteen years, though I was in and out toward the end. Let's call it seventeen and change.
Change.
That's why I had to get out. Wanatah refused to change, even a little, and I was drowning in the sameness.
There were other reasons, of course. After the fire. The third one. People had a different way of looking at me after that. I could see it in their eyes. They had doubts about what I'd done, or if I'd done enough. And fuck every one of them for every one of their doubts.
And, sure, in a town of only a couple hundred houses, you eventually run out of new opportunities, regardless of what kind of opportunities you're looking for.
The Millers' secret porn videos? Seen 'em.
Tanya Schofield's secret love letters? Read 'em.
Sarah Fischer's unsigned divorce papers? Mailed 'em. Anonymously. Back to her, I mean. I did it as a joke. I'm not a monster.
There's only so much fun to be had in a small town, and most curiosities are easily satisfied.
Most.
When I was fifteen, I became curious about a lady who lived in an ugly old house behind The Other Place.
Wanatah has two bars. The Brass Buckle and The Other Place, which doesn't need a better name since there's no mistaking it for being the place it isn't.
This lady's house was in a lot behind that, connected to the street by a dirt road that barely showed signs of tire tracks, because nobody goes there.
One day, while hitching a ride home from school with one of my teachers, I got sent to her door to drop off a pie.
When I knocked, I expected to be greeted by some haggard old lady, because this was the kind of house where some granny gets left to whittle away what's left of her days, alone and forgotten. But the woman who answered the door couldn't have been more than thirty-five.
Thirty-five's old to a teenager, but it's not grandma-old. It's not rotary-phone-old. It's not which one of the gods did you offend so badly that you were punished with this eternal fate kinda-old.
Surely this wasn't Linda, so I asked, "Is Linda home?"
"I'm Linda," she said with a smile.
She was wearing an almost fancy blue dress that made it look like she had somewhere to go, but the rusted-out Chevy in the gravel driveway said she wasn't going anywhere, and the layer of dust on the welcome mat said nobody comes to see her.
"Is there another Linda here?"
"No, sweetie, it's just me. I like your shoes."
I looked down and realized we were both wearing the same sneakers. And, oh my God, I owned a dress like hers too. And, oh no, I could feel a meltdown coming on.
"Oh yeah. Oh, hi. You're Linda? I have a pie. It's from Mrs. McAllister, from school. She made the pie. She made it for you. It's a pie."
I was standing there, handing her a pie, thrice telling her it was a pie. I kept saying pie because if I said a single word about anything other than that goddamn pie, I knew I'd make the nice young lady in the nasty grandma house cry.
"I hope you like... pie."
Fourth time's the charm, eh?
The inside of my head was swirling with words that could never be said.
I wanted to scream, "Goddamn, lady! How did this happen to you? Why do you live alone in this huge, ugly house down a dirt road where nobody goes? Don't you have any family? Or friends? And if you don't, why do you stay in this tiny, shitty, town? Are you trapped? Is this what happens to people who stay here? Am I gonna be trapped too, just like you?" But those are questions one cannot ask, though the world would be a better place if we could.
When I handed her the pie, I'd reached the part of our interaction where I was supposed to leave, but my feet wouldn't move. I didn't understand what I was seeing. And I didn't know how to stop looking. And, oh my, I couldn't stop saying pie.
"It sure looks like... a nice pie."
"Would you like to come in and have some?"
"No, no, no, no no no."
I slowly began to back away, but I couldn't take my eyes off the wrongness of the scene.
This was the grandma of grandma houses, but Linda was no grandma and she was never gonna be one.
I'm not saying I understood that, at age fifteen. But I knew what I saw, and I knew it was sad. Linda was too young and too alive to be stuck in such a lonely, hopeless house on a dead-end street in a dead-end town.
How does that happen to someone? Was it going to happen to me? Had my fate already been decided?
When I got back to Mrs. McAllister's car, I said, "What the hell is wrong with her???"
"Dandy!!! That's not a polite way to ask. She's just getting over a cold."
No, no, no.
There was a lot more wrong with what I saw than that.
I didn't see a lady with the sniffles.
I saw a lady in the prime of her life with no life at all. Surely, she could leave that house, and yet, she was trapped. But how? And why?
"It's Wanatah, isn't it," I said.
"Is what, Wanatah, Dandy?"
"Wanatah did that to her. Right?"
"When a cold's going around, everybody's bound to get it."
Mrs. McAllister didn't get it, and I'm not talking about a cold.