Out of everything they had lost due to the harsh economic times, Madeline missed making pie more than anything. Her ache of longing had begun almost immediately after she and Louis were forced from the city and into a dilapidated three-room house in the countryside, and by now it had boiled up within her. She doubted anyone was eating pie at the moment; people’s needs– let alone wants– had shifted away from luxuries like pie and pastries and landed on simpler commodities, like bread, or a job for the day.
Glancing around at the shack’s kitchen, she began to wonder how only a few short years earlier, she had been sitting in a spacious kitchen, pulling a warm, flaky pie– perhaps apple or cherry– from the oven and handing it to one of her neighbors, enclosed in a small cardboard box. The pies had allowed her to pass through the archway of her community, as well as into the catacombs of neighborhood gossip. Though she generally tried her best to kill the rumors that found their way to her ears, it always gave her a certain satisfaction that people trusted her with their secrets. When the materials for pie became too expensive for ordinary purchase and the desserts themselves became more scarce, her customers began to dwindle. Each week, Madeline was forced to hike her prices a few cents to ensure she could still buy ingredients, and each week, those same ingredients would inevitably rise in cost as well, taunting her. Eventually, between her customers drifting away and Louis remaining unable to find teaching positions in the city, they were no longer able to afford their rent, and abandoned their suburban home for the smaller towns on the southern outskirts of the city.
The move had initially excited Madeline. She firmly agreed that the only constant in life was change, and she never failed to appreciate change for what it was. Moving was a chance to start over completely, to be free of the monotony of a previous lifestyle. The shoddily-crafted house they had moved into was undoubtedly a fixer-upper, but she and Louis had always been fixers.
In this particular case, she had assumed that a more inexpensive style of living would allow her to continue baking, which would in turn attract a flock of new customers. Over time, however, the same feelings of monotony began to take over, and prices for ingredients remained unreasonably high. Without her baking or the ability to experiment with new recipes, it began to feel as though they had never left their old life in the city, but merely exchanged it for a less comfortable version.
She stirred impassively at a bowl of chili, daydreaming about pie and waiting for Louis to return from work. A short time later, the gaze of two headlights danced across the small house through the window, and she heard tires roll to a stop in the dusty driveway outside. The engine quieted down to a whisper, and Madeline peered through the open blinds to make sure she recognized the car. Their silver Model T greeted her, parked just beyond George’s black Chevrolet. A cloud of dirt blustered over the headlights of their car as they flickered off, and Louis’s figure emerged. The door slammed behind him.
Before he even entered the house, she could tell something had gone wrong by the hurried pacing of his footsteps. Louis never hurried. His entrance confirmed her fears. She had seen him coming home after his jobs, eyes gleaming with such excitement that she could practically track the adrenaline as it coursed through his veins. She had seen the relief that washed over his body as he slumped down into a chair for dinner and stashed his briefcase away for the night. She had seen the way his face lit up the first time they had opened the briefcase together and gone to bed knowing they would be able to pay their rent for months to come.
This wasn’t it.
He entered the house sweating, hair matted against his head, eyes bulging with a sort of horror she had never seen on his face before. He trembled as he walked to the dinner table and slouched in his chair, defeated. The whites of his eyes were stained red.
“What’s wrong? What happened? Are you okay?” She paused, glancing out at the two cars sitting idle in the driveway. “Is George okay?”
He looked up at her but didn’t say a word.
“Hon?” she said. “Where’s George?”
Louis remained quiet. Madeline’s mind instantaneously leaped to the worst-case scenario.
“He’s not….” She paused, remembering the state Louis was in. The last thing she wanted to do was aggravate the situation for her husband. “He’s fine, right?”
Louis took a moment before saying, “I left him there.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What? Why? What happened? Start at the beginning.”
Louis’s lower lip quivered. “Can I have some water, please?”
“Of course, yeah.” Madeline filled a cup from the sink and handed it to him. He gulped it down and set it on the countertop delicately.
“I knew this was going to happen eventually,” he began to weep silently. “I knew this was going to happen.”
Madeline sat down beside him and rubbed his back through his white button-down shirt.
“He shot a kid.”
Madeline’s hand stopped. She felt a jolt hit her stomach. She looked at him.
Louis hung his head and repeated it. “He shot a kid.”
“Who did?” she asked. The instinctive answer was George, as he was the only one who ever accompanied Louis on the jobs. But this didn’t match the George she and Louis knew, the one who had helped Louis find a job at a local tavern when all the town’s teaching positions were filled, who had helped them find a house when he heard they were being forced from the city. The optimistic and amicable man who stopped by with his fiancé to play cards with them on Saturday nights, giving Madeline an excuse to scrounge up the ingredients for a pie. There was simply no way it was him. “But if not,” she thought to herself, “who else?”
Madeline asked again. “Who did?”
“George.”
Even as much as she had predicted it, it still sent her stomach plummeting. “George, like George George? From work?”
Louis nodded and wiped away the water from his eyes.
“Why?” she asked. “Wh- why would he?”
“The kid was drawing our pictures. On a newspaper, in the margins. We saw him outside on the sidewalk, drawing something and looking at us. Got all big-eyed when we saw him. I was just finishing up with the money, and George said he was going outside to take the paper from him, and the kid starts running. Down the street. George, he…. The whole time, I was just thinking, just chase the kid down, tear up the paper. But the kid was real fast, and George… I don’t know,” Louis kneaded his hands and took a shaky breath. “It must’ve just been in the moment, ‘cause I just saw him raise his gun and shoot, and then everything froze. Everyone in the bank, everyone on the street. It was like the whole town had turned to ice. George too. He just froze there. Staring at what he did. And then, eventually, he runs over to the kid and takes the newspaper and turns back at me…. He tries to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear him, and….”
“You left him there. In town?”
“I panicked too. Christ, I’m still panicking. I don’t know why. I just knew I had to get out of there, so I got in the car and drove off. He started chasing after me, telling me to wait, but all I could think is… ‘he just shot a kid.’”
Silence festered throughout the house. Louis stared at the table, tapping his fingers along its battered wooden top. Madeline stared at the front door. Her thoughts turned to the pies she had been daydreaming about earlier. Earlier, they had seemed almost tangible; the only thing hindering her had been the depression. Now even the weekly card games with George, not to mention the pies that occasionally accompanied them, seemed ages away, as though they were part of her old life, the one she so often dreamed about. Each time she began to wander longingly toward her fantasies, she was snagged and pulled back to the real world by what Louis had just told her. Her mind, as Louis’s had been, was invaded by one phrase: “George just shot a kid.”
“How old was he?” she finally asked.
“Ten, eleven,” Louis said, his voice devoid of life. “Young.”
On the stove, the chili bubbled. Without a word, Madeline stood and turned the heat off, then spooned it into a bowl. She passed the bowl to Louis. “Eat,” she said. “It’ll help.”
The bowl came to rest a few inches from Louis, who remained perfectly still, fixated on his cuticles. Madeline sat and pushed the bowl the rest of the way into his hands.
“I’m done. I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore. I know we need the money, but it’s not—I don’t care how much it brings in. I’m sorry, I really am… I’m—”
“I know,” Madeline said. “It’s okay. A wave of relief washed over her, coupled by a wave of uncertainty. She had never approved of the robberies and had made certain Louis knew that. The ever-present threat of being discovered kept her awake at night, tormenting her mind. But she tolerated them for one reason—they were the only thing that had allowed them to retain some form of comfort from their old life. Without the influx of money, even something as simple and trivial as pie would be rendered unattainable. It would be just as much of a dream as when they started, which pained her to think about.
“I understand.” She paused. “Does George know?”
Louis nodded. “I told him—I said when we started this whole thing that if anyone dies, I’m out. He said he understood. Said nobody would die.” Louis rubbed his eyes with his palms. “He gets paranoid about this kind of thing though. When we were planning it out, he would go on and on about the smallest possibilities. He’ll assume that I’m going to the police.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Louis stared into his bowl and absentmindedly stabbed at a sliver of beef with his spoon. Eventually Madeline stood and ladled chili into a second bowl. As she sat again, she said, “I think that might be best.”
Louis looked up, startled. “Telling the police?” he asked.
“Yeah. I mean—”
“Hon, if I tell them, I’m going to jail. George too. Maybe even you, as an accomplice or not turning us in or something. That happens, then all of our plans, kids included, it’s all gone. I… there has to be a way to be done without telling him.”
Her mind spun. Jail was the ultimate blasphemer of their plans. The impact on their future plans had hardly even occurred to her, but she realized that Louis was right. She began to ponder what their life could hold without jail, envisioning their children dashing around in the front yard on their short, thin legs, racing inside to the smell of a pie. She stole an expectant glance at the oven; its empty, cavernous window stared back. If Louis went to prison, her vision would be just that—a vision. Nothing more. Empty as the oven before her.
“Still”, she thought, “if Louis doesn’t go to the police, but George is under the impression that he did, there’s no knowing how George might react. If he does something awful again, then where will we be?”
“Look, you said George already thinks you’re going to the police,” she said. “You said he gets paranoid about this kind of thing. Clearly, he does… irrational things when he’s paranoid. So, if you get to the sheriff’s office before George does something irrational, then they might be able to protect you.”
“Protect me? Meaning what?”
Madeline stirred her chili. “I don’t know what he might do.” She paused. “Do you know where he is right now?”
Louis shook his head. “He ran away on foot.”
“He might well be on his way here right now, if for nothing else than to just get his car,” Madeline said. “We should go soon.”
“Madeline, I’ll go to jail. I don’t know how long I’d be in there—”
“He might cut you some slack for being honest. For coming right out and admitting it.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“These are tough times for everyone, right? You’re doing it to help us. For your family. For our future. It’s for a good reason, right?”
Louis shrugged, staring at the floor. “It’s still a crime. Robbery’s still robbery no matter the reason for it. Murder’s still murder.”
“You didn’t commit murder.”
“Accomplice to it counts as a crime too. I read it in books. I’m still guilty if I’m there. Same type of thing applies to you. If you know and don’t turn me in, that’s—that means you’re guilty too, I think. If the police find out, you could go to jail too. I’m not letting that happen.”
“Hon, they’re just books,” she said. “They’re fiction, aren’t they?”
“I guess so. Still, I’m not risking it. If you could go to jail…. I won’t do that.”
“He won’t find out I knew.” She blew the heat off a spoonful of chili and swallowed it.
“You don’t know that for sure,” Louis set his head on his palms and stared at his shoes. “I don’t want to go to jail. This was all a big mistake. I wish I could go back in time and stop it all from happening. Tell myself not to do it. Or maybe just tell that kid to go home. Something like that. Maybe give him some change and tell him to go off and buy a candy.”
“There’s no reason to think like —"
“I can’t, I know, but I’m just saying it would be nice.” Louis looked up to meet Madeline’s eyes, and she noticed it was the first time he had done so since he arrived home. “What’re we going to do?” he asked.
Madeline swallowed a spoonful of chili. She clicked her spoon against the worn kitchen table and gazed around the room, at the old cooking ware hanging from various spots on the walls. At the porcelain of the sink, which had long ago begun to fragment in the corners. At the oven, which had barely been used since they moved in. Her thoughts moved back to her old life, where a pie would have been turning a crisp golden-brown and someone would be knocking at her door soon to pick it up. Maybe the oven would even hold two pies—an extra one for her and Louis to enjoy later that night.
Louis reached for a napkin, interrupting her field of vision and dragging her back down to her current oven, empty and chipping at the edges.
“We could always try to run, right?” she said.
Louis looked up from a spoonful of chili. “Run?”
“Out of town. Leave all this behind. George couldn’t find us. Neither could Bill. We just pack up and drive north, or west. Up north’s supposed to be nicer, I think. Maybe Wyoming. Live on a ranch, off the land?”
Louis sniffled. “I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“We have a life here,” Louis said. “We can’t just leave all of a sudden.”
“Hon, our old life was life. This is just existing. We could leave whenever we want. Who would notice? George, sure. Maybe some of our other friends that we see every once in a while. But other than them, we don’t have much of a life here.”
Louis itched his chin, clearly thinking it over. Madeline’s vision of the oven and the pies returned, almost commanding her to keep selling their escape. “Just imagine,” her mind urged. “A dinner, a conversation with Louis without that looming threat of being caught. Your family thriving, your kids growing up, without that axe dangling over your life.”
“It wouldn’t be all that difficult,” Madeline added. “If we take everything we have from the last few months, we’d have enough to buy a decent place. And neither of us goes to jail. We’d still be able to try for kids.”
Louis managed the ghost of a smile. “That could work, I think.”
“Everything we have could fit into the car. We could be out by the morning if we—”
Her sentence was cut short by a gravelly voice from outside.
“Lou?”
Louis turned to the door, wide-eyed again. The voice persisted. “Lou?”
Louis and Madeline stared at each other from across the table.
A third time, “I just want to talk. Can we talk about earlier?”
Apprehensively, Louis stood and inched toward the front door. Madeline followed him and leaned against the wall, listening through the window and peeking under the blinds. She crouched down below the wall, peering from the bottom corner of the window, where she caught a glimpse of George. His shoulders were hunched, his hands stuffed in his pockets. His typically cheery expression was gone from his face, though he was making a tremendous effort to replicate it. He donned a weak, twisted, almost queasy smile as Louis stepped through the threshold of the door, and it sent a nervous shiver through her.
Louis shuffled to the end of the porch near Madeline, closing the door behind him. He stood up straighter, plastered a half-hearted greeting smile on his face, and asked, “How are you?”
“Good,” George said. “Still getting over it though.”
“Me too,” Louis said.
“I’ve never done that before.”
Louis gave a phony breath of a chuckle. “I’d be surprised if you had.”
George mimicked Louis’s courtesy laugh. A silence fell over the porch.
“Are you here to get your car?” Louis asked eventually.
George nodded, but Madeline could tell by the way his eyes darted away from Louis’s that this was not the only reason George had come.
“Yeah, I don’t want to have to hitchhike back to my house too. Figured I could stop off here and talk too. Kill two birds with one stone.”
Louis nodded in understanding. George made eye contact with him again, and Madeline felt her pulse quicken as he did.
“Why’d you drive off?”
“I panicked,” Louis paused. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Really. It was, uh, kind of a chaotic situation.”
“Sure was.” Another pause.
“Listen, George, I—” Louis began.
“I’m sorry, Lou. I really am. You know that’s not me.”
“George.”
“It’s not! It was in the moment. And I know you said that if anyone died… then you’d be out, but I’m begging you, not now. Not yet, okay? We only need to do this a few more times. Things seem like they’re going to change, don’t they? This Roosevelt? He seems like he could get us out of this mess. If he wins in November, we won’t have to rob another bank ever again, okay? Just… two more months. Not even that. Less than two months of it, and then we’re done. Never again. And now it’s going to be even easier! They know what we can do now, don’t they? Word spreads fast—”
“What you can do.”
George paused.
Louis swallowed. “People know what you can do,” he repeated.
“Lou, come on, it’s not like that. I couldn’t do that in normal circumstances. You know me. I’m not a bad guy. You know I wouldn’t do that if I had any other choice.”
“You could’ve run after him. You had a choice.”
“That kid was going to get us both caught.” Madeline heard George’s voice getting more desperate, more panicked. She hoped Louis could hear it too. “Neither of us want to go to jail, right? You want to keep up your life with Madeline. You two want kids, right? You want your kid to spend the first years of their life with no father because you let someone escape with your picture sketched down? Same goes for me — I want to make a life with Abby. I’m going to ask her to marry me soon. I want to settle down, like you did. Jail keeps all that from happening, you know that!”
“You had a choice, George.”
Silence.
“Lou, please. I need you to be with me on this.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. Not anymore.”
Madeline held her breath. She heard George sigh, his breath shaking. “Okay. I understand.” He paused. “I’ll be seeing you then. Tomorrow.”
Madeline saw Louis’s eyes widen. “What for?”
“To play cards,” George said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ll bring Abby like always.”
Madeline felt herself quietly sink to the floor in relief.
“Maybe Madeline can make one of those pies of hers, if she can afford the ingredients.”
“Hopefully. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” Louis said.
“Sure would.” George said. His voice sounded hollow. Madeline heard him take a few steps off the wooden porch and away from the house. Slowly, cautiously, she exhaled.
Then the footsteps stopped. “Before I go….”
Madeline perked up. She adjusted herself in time to see Louis stiffen as George approached the house again, coming back up the stairs onto the porch.
“Before I go, I have to ask.” George said. “Are you going to tell anyone what happened?”
Madeline glanced at George through the window. His eyes were intense, his mouth pulled taut. His tone of voice painted the question as a threat.
“No,” Louis replied. “Nobody.”
“Not even Madeline?” George asked.
Louis shook his head. Madeline could sense his nervousness, his sudden uncertainty about what to do with his hands. She knew George could as well.
“Is she home?” The wooden boards of the porch creaked as George fidgeted.
“No.” It came out too quickly.
“Where is she?”
Louis stared. “George, do you have your gun on you?”
“Does it change your answer if I do?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Why would it?”
“You’re telling me if I came to your house with a gun and asked if Abby was there, you wouldn’t do the same thing? You’re telling me you wouldn’t lie to protect her?”
“I’m just asking.”
“So am I. Do you have your gun on you?”
The world held its breath waiting for George to answer. Madeline watched Louis begin to tremble. George gave a grim nod. “She knows. Which means she’s here.”
Louis stammered. “She doesn’t. I swear.”
“Yes, she does.”
She silently inhaled, trying to remain calm. Her eyes flicked between the two of them.
“There… there are eyewitnesses,” Louis said. “You can’t kill everyone who saw.”
“Witnesses won’t recognize us. Neither of us ever go to that part of town. I got the paper from the kid. The only ones who know are you and Madeline. She didn’t have to, but that’s not my fault.”
Madeline’s eyes flashed around the room for an escape, for a door or a window she could run out of. But even if she did make it out, Louis was dead if she didn’t intervene. She needed to get between George and Louis.
“Are you serious about this?”
George’s breath shook again. “I wanted you to be back in. I hoped you could forget it.”
“We… we won’t tell,” Louis said. “We’re leaving town anyways.”
“You’re leaving town? Right after a kid got shot? That’s how you raise suspicions.”
“And you don’t do the same by killing two people?” Louis’s voice quivered.
“Not if you cover it up well enough.”
Madeline watched the hope drain from Louis’s eyes. “There’s no going back from that,” she thought. “There’s no talking George out of this. No more card nights. No more pies. It’s done.”
She crouched, her back pressed tight against the wall. She was frozen in place, rooted to the floor of the house.
“I don’t want to do this,” George said. “Same as before, with the kid.”
Madeline unfroze. She ran across the kitchen, her bare feet pattering on the wood, and grabbed the pot of chili from the stove. She surged back toward the door and thrust it open. George turned to her just as she swung the pot. It connected with his shoulder as he drew his pistol and fired a bullet past her into the house. Chili speckled his face as he stumbled backward against the porch railing. Madeline swung again, this time slamming the cast-iron pot against his temple. George’s head slumped, and he tumbled down the porch steps into the grass.
Louis stood still, his wide eyes darting between George at the base of the steps and Madeline, who stood ready to swing the now-empty pot a third time. “Christ, you— is he dead?” Louis asked.
Madeline did not answer.
“Hon, did you kill him?” Louis asked, pleading. “Madeline. Madeline, if he’s dead…”
She stared at George for several minutes before cautiously approaching him and bending down, placing an apprehensive hand against his neck. Madeline looked up at Louis. “He’s just knocked out. He’s breathing.”
Louis crumpled where he stood, sitting down heavily on the top step and running a hand through his unkempt hair, taking deliberate inhales and exhales to calm down. Madeline nudged the pistol away from George’s side and crouched beside Louis on the porch. They remained motionless for some time, staring off at the fields of tall, drying grass that encircled their house. The moon had vacated the night sky, leaving only the stars to light the sprawling fields.
“We didn’t have this at our old house,” Louis said after a while. “You couldn’t see any of the stars at night.”
Another moment passed before Louis said, “He’s right. We can’t run. It’ll look like I killed the kid. Neighbors will have heard the gunshot too. We won’t have enough time before the police come here.” He looked straight ahead, his eyes dim. “I think I’m going to have to go to jail.”
Madeline nodded. “Just tell the truth. No more lies.”
“And you?”
“Hitting him was in self-defense.”
“Not that,” Louis said. “You knowing about the robberies.”
“I never knew about it. He can’t prove I did.” She paused. “One more lie.”
“What about everything else? Wyoming? Kids?”
“I’ll be waiting when you get out. We can leave then. How long do you think you’ll be?”
“At least a few years would be my guess. Whatever it is, you think you can have some pie ready for me when I get out? Blackberry, maybe?” Louis cracked a hint of a smile, one glazed with sadness. Madeline could tell that, just as she was, Louis was admitting to himself that it would be a long time before pie was an option for them again. They both turned and stared back up at the night sky.
“We’ll see,” she said after a long moment. Gazing at the stars, they leaned against one another and waited.