The woman's cart accidentally bumped into a table display of pies, cakes and assorted baked goods. The table collapsed and all that it contained went tumbling to the floor.

Nicole craved sweets. Her list included peach pie, rhubarb pie, and pumpkin pie, all of which would be on hand the following week for the Fourth of July cookout on the bluff, so she knew Quinnie cooks would have their recipe cards nearby. In addition to pies, she wanted recipes for blueberry cobbler, apple crisp, molasses Indian pudding, Isobel Skane's chocolate almond candy, and, of course, Melissa Parker's marble macadamia brownies.

She baked coconut cream pies for anybody. If somebody died, she'd get a call and someone would ask her to bake a couple of pies. She sent pies to people we had no idea who they were.

Lois and Eloise and Benji have been cooking from the book all week in preparation, making everything from homemade marshmallows and chewy pates de fruit, to homemade Oreos and Better than Nutter Butters. Caramels, macarons, miniparfaits filled with apple compote and vanilla custard and olive oil cake. Insane little chocolate tarts. Shortbreads and chocolates and my personal favorite, the Chocolate Bouchan, essentially a cork-shaped brownie that is one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted.

My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she'd tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked into bed, I would send out a thank-you prayer to the carpentry boss for taking in what I could not. But this morning I was the only one, and it was the weekend, and carpentry rested, and the whole kitchen smelled of hometown America, of Atlanta's orchards and Oregon's berry bushes, of England's pie legacy, packed with the Puritans over the Mayflower.

And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual.