Harriet was starting to think she was never going to get this right. Thanksgiving Day loomed over her like a mountain; tomorrow, her family would see just how much time and effort Harriet had wasted trying to recreate Grandma’s special recipe. Each attempt was riddled with new mistakes. If Harriet managed to get the lattice looking straight and neat, she would burn the whole pie, turning her beautiful crust into a charred mess. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t solve the equation and find a balance between all of the ingredients. Hell, she didn’t even know for sure what the proper ingredients were! She had begun to notice her family in the living room watching her and grimacing every time she put her latest experiment into the oven.
The last four days leading up to Thanksgiving Harriet had mostly spent in the kitchen. Each morning, she would wake up around seven, fix herself a cup of coffee, and draft the day’s plans and to-do lists. Sitting at the kitchen table in the dim early light, she would rack her brain for new ingredients to try. Harriet would pace back and forth from the spice rack to the refrigerator door, hands hesitantly reaching the heavy cream or nutmeg, to the table and back again. Some mornings, she would repeat this path a dozen times before settling on her ingredients for the day, as well as deciding what to retrieve from the grocery store.
Much to her appreciation, the rest of the Sinclair family, all of which were there in Grandma’s house for the holiday, stayed out of her way. Even the youngest cousin Cass had been well trained by Grandma herself to refrain from entering the kitchen without express permission. “Stay out of the kitchen or you´ll be put out of dinner,” Grandma had always warned them. Even though she wasn´t the one cooking, the family treated her kitchen like a sacred space in which only the high priestess could enter. Some high priestess of the kitchen Harriet was.
The trouble wasn’t that Harriet’s pies were bad. No, in comparison to any other pie, the blend of spices and fruits in the filling paired with the buttery crust was superb. But Grandma’s Autumn Pie wasn’t a dessert you could just buy at the store. This pie was the brainchild of Bobbie Sinclair, and she had never written the recipe down. Harriet supposed she thought she would have more time to transcribe her thoughts onto paper, but her time had been cut in late October. Her death was sudden; a heart attack seemingly from out of nowhere. As the coroner would inform them, it had been caused by myocarditis, an illness Grandma’s doctors had not discovered in time. The coroner had also told them they could sue for negligence, but it didn’t matter to the Sinclairs why their beloved matriarch was gone, just that she was no longer around. Her funeral, packed with kind friends and distant relatives there to honor Grandma’s memory, had only been a week and a half before. The family was still reeling from Grandma’s absence. This Thanksgiving had been more somber than ones prior, although Grandma would never have wanted that. Harriet knew as well as her aunts and uncles that Grandma would want her family to enjoy this holiday with each other, but how could they when the glue that held them together was gone? That was why Harriet had resolved to recreate the Autumn Pie. Her family needed some normality this Thanksgiving, and without her staple dessert, the loss of Grandma would only sting more.
Much to everyone’s dismay, Harriet’s resolve to recreate her grandmother’s pie and keep the tradition alive seemed to be misplaced. Her brother Kieth had settled at the dining table to watch Harriet attempt another pie as he ate breakfast. A long stretch of silence, interrupted only by the clanking of the metal spoon against the glass mixing bowl, hung over the kitchen.
“Harriet?”
“Kieth, what was Grandma’s rule?”
Kieth rolled his eyes and stood from his seat, abandoning his syrup-soggy waffles. He propped himself against the edge of the counter, swiping the side of the bowl to taste the filling Harriet had been mixing.
“This is delicious!”
Harriet tossed the spoon back into the bowl, untying her apron and washing her hands as she sighed, “It’s not right. It’s not Grandma’s.”
Kieth reached for his sister’s shoulder in an effort to comfort her, but she shrugged it away. Harriet’s back was turned as she hunched over the sink, washing the bowl clean of the filling she had deemed unworthy.
“You’ve been in the kitchen for most of the break, Harriet. I have to go back to Cornell after tomorrow, and I’ve barely seen you because you’ve been worked up over a pie! Take a break and hang out with me,” he pleaded. The dishes clattered in the sink as Harriet whirled around on her brother in exasperation.
“What do you expect me to do? Grandma didn’t leave a recipe, so I have to figure it out!”
Kieth pondered this for a moment before an idea dawned on him.
“Did you check in the basement?” He asked.
Harriet had certainly thought of the basement. Chances are, the recipe would be in the basement, along with all of Grandma’s other belongings. Scavenging through the furniture and boxes of Grandma’s things would not only be tedious and very possibly pointless, but also something Harriet nor any of the Sinclairs were ready for. Aunt Beverly, Grandma’s oldest child, had hired movers to pack up everything and transport it to the basement to avoid the daunting task altogether. None of the Sinclairs had been inside since. But if Harriet was going to make this pie and keep Grandma’s tradition alive, the basement was where she would inevitably end up. At least she wouldn’t be alone since Kieth had brought it up.
“Not yet. I was leaving it as a last resort.” She told him.
“I’d say it’s time to take the leap.” Kieth looked over at the burnt pie from this morning and shuddered. “You need that recipe before you give it another go.” He insisted. Irritation flared up in Harriet’s chest, but she swallowed the sharp words on her tongue; he was right after all. Grandma’s recipe box contained the missing puzzle piece, and Harriet was running out of time to figure it out.
By the time they’d reached the top of the stairs, Kieth seemed to have lost his earlier nerve. He lingered at his older sister’s side at the threshold. Harriet sucked in a deep breath before taking the first step on their descent into the room she’d been so keen on avoiding. Kieth trailed at her heels, stopping only for a moment as the cold air burst forth from the creaky door Harriet had opened. There was no turning back now.
Neither one of them spoke as they took in the walls lined with Grandma’s antique furniture, racks of her clothing, and boxes upon boxes of her belongings. None of it had collected dust; their presence in the basement was fresh, just like the wound Grandma’s death had left on their hearts. Harriet’s hands shook as she reached into a box labelled “Miscellaneous” in messy Sharpie. As she rummaged through it, Kieth glided his fingers along the wooden china cabinet, still filled to the brim with porcelain dishes and plates that Grandma had carefully arranged. The movers had certainly abided by Aunt Beverly’s instructions to leave everything just as they had found it. The objects that surrounded them on each visit, objects that used to simply be trinkets or decoration throughout the house, were no painful reminders of the woman who had collected them. Kieth averted his eyes from the framed family pictures that had been removed from the foyer as he set to the task at hand: finding the recipe box.
Despite their efforts, after half an hour both Harriet and Kieth remained empty handed. Harriet’s hope was dwindling fast; she didn’t know how many more boxes of her grandmother’s things she could dig through before it became too much. Silent tears had threatened to spill over when she discovered a box filled with Grandma’s scrapbooks. For as long as Harriet could remember, Grandma had always been in the process of putting some kind of scrapbook together. She made them for any old occasion: birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, family trips, or just because she had leftover stationary. Endless pictures of her family and friends were contained within the pages of dozens of scrapbooks, and all of them had ended up in this box. Harriet had not touched any of them. As soon as she realized what they were, she silently closed the box and pushed it away from her, hiding it behind a bookcase. She should have known Kieth would find it eventually. As he curiously pulled the box out from its hiding place, Kieth turned to Harriet and asked, “Did you see these? Look at all of them! No wonder Grandma had arthritis; she was always cutting photos and gluing pages together to make these old things!”
Feigning a smile, Harriet pulled the nearest scrapbook within her reach and looked at the cover. Her smile faded when she read the words written in Grandma’s loopy cursive: “Thanksgiving 2025.” Wordlessly, she turned the scrapbook around and held it up for Kieth to see. The color drained from his face as he understood why Harriet had gone quiet.
“She made one for this year already?” Kieth questioned, voicing Harriet’s exact thoughts.
Harriet nodded as she nervously opened the scrapbook. Each page had already been decorated with different shades of gold and maroon and burnt orange. Every member of the family had a page with an open slot for the picture they would take tomorrow if Grandma was here to make them, but instead of an empty plastic sleeve, each one hosted a letter. Harriet and Kieth sat there in astonishment as they flipped through, confirming that every sleeve held a letter for every Sinclair.
Nervously, Harriet scanned each page until her eyes locked with her own name glaring back at her. She fumbled with the sleeve for a moment, sliding the letter out and grasping it in her hands. Kieth took the scrapbook from his sister and claimed his own letter, hastily tearing it open. Before he read it, he looked back up at Harriet with an eyebrow raised. “Why aren’t you opening it?” He asked. Truth be told, Harriet didn’t know; she chalked it up to being afraid of what awaited her inside the envelope. Grandma had something left to tell her, and after Harriet read her words, she was really gone. That was it. Those very well may be the last words that Grandma would ever truly say to her. Harriet didn’t have to open it; she could leave her grandmother’s final words to her unsaid, at least for now until she was ready to fully let her go. Then again, she may never be ready.
Kieth reached for his sister’s shaking hands, sensing her hesitation. She looked up at him with glistening eyes filled with tears that threatened to spill over.
“You don’t have to hold it in, you know? I miss her too.”
Those words were what pushed Harriet and her rising emotions over the edge. Harriet cried into her brother’s arms for a long time while he rubbed her back and stroked her hair. Kieth didn’t try to shush her or silence her grief. He cried a few tears of his own as he held his sister. By the time she pulled away, the front of his yellow sweater was thoroughly soaked with tears.
“It’s been so hard without Grandma here. I never realized just how much she did for all of us. Not just during the holidays or on special occasions, but all the time. Our whole lives!” Harriet exclaimed as she frantically pulled scrapbook after scrapbook from their box, carelessly tossing them onto the floor before her. “Look at all of them! She loved us so much that she basically documented our whole childhoods. Look around you; our lives are in these boxes while the woman who loved us enough to keep all this stuff around is gone! All this, and I can’t even make a simple pie to keep one of Grandma’s traditions alive. Some granddaughter I am.”
Kieth grabbed Harriet’s hands, stabilizing her and forcing her to look at him.
“I promise you that Grandma never expected you to figure things out immediately after she passed. You’ve gotten so wrapped up in keeping her traditions alive that you’ve forgotten why she made all of them in the first place. It was because she loved her family more than anything. That’s the whole point of Thanksgiving, isn’t it? To be with the ones you love and let them know how much you care?” Kieth said. As Harriet considered, the fog seemed to lift from her eyes. Her brother was right; it wasn’t the pie that really mattered, it was the ones she’d share it with.
“Even if Grandma isn’t here with us, her memory still will be.” Harriet croaked, desperately clinging to the hope in those words.
“With or without that pie.” Kieth assured her. “Now open your letter!”
A ragged giggle escaped Harriet’s lips as she wiped the streaks her tears had left and tore open the envelope. The piece of paper that she pulled out was worn and stained in multiple places by something a familiar shade of auburn. As Harriet unfurled it, she realized exactly what it was: the recipe for Autumn Pie. In the top right corner, Grandma had written, “Harriet- I reckoned you would be needing this! You always loved my piet; I always tried to make it as sweet as you, my girl.”
Harriet beamed at the note and ran her thumb over the indents made by Grandma’s pen. Her heart felt lighter than it had before, almost whole again. She handed Kieth the recipe card to read as she hoisted herself off the floor.
“She always did have her ways,” Kieth chuckled in astonishment. Harriet laughed along and plucked her beloved recipe card from Kieth’s grip before heading towards the stairs.
“Thanks to her scrapbooks, those ways will keep on for a long time.” Harriet chirped. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a pie to make!”