The card is four inches by six and it has been in the same tin since before I was born.
Sour cherry pie. My grandmother’s handwriting, blue ballpoint, the loops of a woman taught to write in 1943.
Crust first. Exact flour weight, which nobody else’s grandmother did in 1962. The fat, which is half butter and half lard and she would not be moved on that. The temperature of the water, which she specified as cold enough to hurt.
Filling. The cherries, the sugar, the tapioca instead of cornstarch, the almond extract measured in drops.
Oven temperature. Rack position. The trick with the foil.
Then the lattice. And it gets three lines into the lattice, and then, in the middle of the line, it says:
Then you—
And that’s it. That’s the end of the card. There’s a quarter inch of white space and then the edge.
For forty years, every woman in my family who ever asked about it got the exact same answer, in the exact same tone, and if you’re from a family like mine you already know the tone.
“Come over. I’ll show you the rest.”
I’m Wilhelmina Vandermeer. Everybody calls me Willa. I’m forty-three, I’m the middle of three girls, and I finished the card in the summer of 2001, when I was eighteen and about to leave for school and furious at my mother about something I could not tell you a single detail of now.
Here’s what “the rest” was.
It took three hours.
You arrived at nine in the morning because she started early. She had already pitted the cherries, which I did not understand until much later was a kindness — she was giving you the good part and keeping the tedious part for herself.
She put an apron on you. Hers, not a guest one. Then she stood behind your right shoulder and she put her hands over your hands.
And she talked.
Not about pie. About whatever came up. She told me about the winter of 1958 when the pipes froze and she and my grandfather slept in the kitchen. She told me she’d wanted to be a court reporter. She told me — and I was eighteen and I nearly dropped the rolling pin — that she had not particularly liked my grandfather for the first two years and that this was normal and that nobody tells girls that.
And at some point in the third hour, she got to the lattice.
I want to describe what that was actually like, because “she taught me to make a pie” is a sentence that means nothing until you’ve had it done to you.
She did not demonstrate. That’s the thing. She never once did a step and then handed it to you. She stood behind your right shoulder with her front against your back, close enough that you could feel her breathing, and she put her palms over the backs of your hands and moved them.
Your hands did it. Every single time. She just told them where to go.
And because she was behind you, you were not looking at her face and she was not looking at yours, and I have thought about that a thousand times since. There is no arrangement on this earth in which a teenage girl will tell you more than the one where nobody has to make eye contact and both people’s hands are busy.
I told that woman things at eighteen that I have never told my husband.
She also fed you, which I didn’t clock as strategy until I was about thirty. There was a plate at eleven — eggs, toast, whatever — and it appeared without being offered, so you couldn’t refuse it. You cannot decline a plate that was never presented as a question.
The pie went in at the end. You did not eat it there. She boxed it and put it in your hands at the door and said, “That’s yours. Don’t let anybody tell you you didn’t make it.”
And then she gave you a card. Your own copy, hand-written, in blue ballpoint, which she must have sat down and written out at that table beforehand knowing you were coming.
Stopped mid-sentence. Same as the original.
I said, at eighteen, on that porch, holding a warm box: “Grandma, you did it again.”
And she said, “Well. Now you’ve got a reason to come back.”
The actual technical content of the missing instruction is about eleven words long. I could write it on this card in nine seconds. It’s a thing about the order you lay the strips and how you fold back alternating ones, and it is in every pie cookbook printed since 1950.
That’s the joke. That’s the whole architecture of it.
The missing half of that recipe was never information. It was her.
You could not learn the pie without spending three hours alone with the woman, in her kitchen, with her hands on your hands, being told things nobody tells you.
She died in January. Ninety-four, in her sleep, in the house on Kirkendall Street.
At the service, my cousin Roselle said, mostly to be saying something, “How many of us do you think finished the card?”
So we counted. In the church basement, over the ham, on the back of a bulletin.
Nineteen.
Nineteen granddaughters, grand-nieces, and neighbor girls. Nineteen women who had gotten three uninterrupted hours alone with Odalie Vandermeer, on purpose, because she had engineered a reason for them to come and had refused for four decades to remove it.
We stood in that basement and looked at each other and understood, all nineteen of us at the same moment, that we had each thought we were the special one.
That’s the detail that got me. Not the number. The fact that every single one of us had walked around for twenty or thirty years quietly believing we’d been chosen — that of all the girls, we were the one she’d wanted three hours with.
And she’d made nineteen women feel that, one at a time, on purpose, and never once let any of us compare notes.
Roselle said the thing out loud, which is why she’s my favorite. She said, “She ran a program on us.”
And my aunt Vidette, who is eighty-one and does not say much, said from the next table over: “She ran a program on everybody. You girls were just the last cohort.”
Nobody knew what she meant. She wouldn’t expand on it. She said she was going to get more ham.
I wrote it up that night and put it online because I couldn’t sleep.
You’ve probably seen it. It went everywhere. Forty thousand shares in a week, and then people started posting their own unfinished recipe cards, and a woman in Ireland made a video of her mother’s, and for about nine days the entire internet was crying about my grandmother’s lattice.
The card stays unfinished. That’s what I wrote at the end of it, and I meant it, and I still do.
Then you— means then you come find your family.
Eleven days after I posted it, I got an email from a woman in Duluth named Gudrun Halvorsen-Reyes.
She said the number was wrong.
She was fifty-eight years old. She was not on our list. She had never been to a Vandermeer reunion and had never met a single person in my family except one.
Attached to the email was a photograph. A girl of about nineteen, in a kitchen I know better than my own, standing at that counter with flour to her elbows and an apron I recognized.
Her, in 1987.
And underneath the photo she’d written:
There were more of us than you know. Ask your mother what your grandmother did on Tuesdays in 1971.
PART 2
I did not ask my mother.
I want to be honest about that, because everything that went wrong afterward starts there. I had a box in my basement and I thought I could get ahead of it.
My grandmother kept calendars. The free kind, from the pharmacy, with a scenic photograph and a grid. Forty-one of them, 1968 through 2008, in a Chiquita banana box that I took home from the house in February because nobody else wanted it.
I got the box out at ten o’clock at night and I started with 1971.
Every Tuesday afternoon had something written in it.
Not a word. A single capital letter and a time. M — 1:00. B — 1:30. D — 12:45.
Every Tuesday. All year. Fifty-one of them, because she skipped the week of Christmas.
And the letters did not repeat.
I sat on my basement floor and pulled 1972. Same thing. 1973, 1974. Tuesdays, letters, times, and in the back of each calendar, on the notes page, a list of first names in her handwriting with a check mark next to each one.
I counted until four in the morning.
Eighty-six.
Eighty-six women, between 1968 and 1979, who came to that kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon and got three hours.
Nineteen of us. We’d been so moved by nineteen.
And in the notes page of the 2008 calendar — the last one, the year she stopped driving, in handwriting that had gone shaky and enormous — there was one more entry, at the bottom of a list of nobody, all alone.
Odalie. 1966.
Her own name. And a year that is two years before the calendars start.
I called Gudrun Halvorsen-Reyes at seven-thirty the next morning, which was rude, and she picked up on the second ring like she’d been waiting eleven days for the phone to ring, which she had.
“You found the calendars,” she said.
I said yes.
“Then I’m going to tell you what your grandmother did,” Gudrun said, “and then I’m going to tell you why you have to be careful, because forty thousand people just shared a story about a pie.”
Between 1966 and roughly 1979, Odalie Vandermeer took in girls.
Not into her house. Into her kitchen, for an afternoon, on a Tuesday, one at a time.
Pregnant girls, mostly. Some of them fifteen, some of them twenty-two. Girls whose families had sent them somewhere — and there was a somewhere, forty minutes north, a maternity home run by a Lutheran charity that operated until 1981 and had, at any given time, between eleven and thirty young women in it who were not allowed to use their real last names.
The home had a work program. The girls did domestic placements in the community. Half a day, unpaid, at a local household — laundry, ironing, cleaning.
My grandmother signed up for the program in 1966 and stayed on the list for thirteen years.
And the girl who came to her house never did one minute of laundry.
She got an apron and three hours and a set of hands over her hands.
“She taught me to make a pie,” Gudrun said, and her voice went. “I was nineteen years old, I was six months along, and I hadn’t been touched by anybody who wasn’t a nurse in four months. Do you understand? Not touched. And this woman put her hands on my hands and talked about her frozen pipes for three hours and didn’t ask me one single question about how I got there.”
She said the last thing every girl got, at the door, was a recipe card.
Unfinished. Stopped mid-sentence.
“She’d say, ‘I didn’t finish it. So you’ve got a reason to come back.'”
I said, and my voice was not steady either, how many came back.
And Gudrun said, “Some. Not many. That wasn’t really the point. The point was that for thirteen years there was a woman in that town who wanted us to have somewhere to come back to.“
Then she said: “Now. Your grandmother’s name is on the internet. Her town’s on the internet. And there are people who were in that home who have spent fifty years not being found.”
I said I don’t understand.
And Gudrun Halvorsen-Reyes said, “You will by Friday. Somebody’s already emailed you. She just hasn’t decided whether to send it.”
PART 3
The email came on Thursday at 11:41 p.m.
The subject line was: Odalie’s kitchen, October 1966.
The woman’s name is Perpetua Skarsgaard-Boone. She’s seventy-eight. She lives in Sioux Falls and she was seventeen years old in the autumn of 1966, and she was in that home, and she was the first girl the program ever sent to Kirkendall Street.
The first. Before the calendars. The one entry on the last page.
Odalie. 1966.
She wrote four paragraphs and I read them standing up in my kitchen.
She said my grandmother didn’t teach her to make a pie. That came later, she said, with the other girls, once Odalie had worked out what to do with them.
In October of 1966 Odalie Vandermeer had no system yet. She just had a seventeen-year-old standing in her front hall with a laundry basket, and she took the basket out of the girl’s hands and put it on the floor and said, “You’re not doing that. Sit down. Are you hungry?”
And then Perpetua wrote the paragraph that I have not stopped thinking about since.
I want you to know something your family may not. She was not being kind to me out of nowhere. She told me, that first day, at that table, that she’d had a baby in 1943 when she was seventeen and it was taken and she never saw it again. She said it plain like she was telling me the weather. She said, “So I know exactly where you are.” I have never in my life had anybody say a truer sentence to me.
I don’t know whether she ever told her own children. If she didn’t, I’m sorry. But I’ve been the only person carrying that for fifty-nine years and I’m seventy-eight and I would like to put it down.
My grandmother was born in 1926.
In 1943 she was seventeen years old. She married my grandfather in 1949. My mother was born in 1951.
I sat down on my kitchen floor.
And then I did the thing I still have not entirely forgiven myself for, which is that I called my mother at midnight.
Marguerite Vandermeer-Lisk is seventy-four. She lives eleven minutes from me. She was in bed.
And I read her the paragraph.
There was a silence on that phone so long I said her name twice.
Then my mother said, “Willa. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”
She hung up.
She did not speak to me for nine days.
When she finally came over, she sat at my table and she said the following, and I’m going to give it exactly.
“I knew there was something. I’ve known since I was about eleven. There was a photograph in a drawer in the sewing room that my mother would not talk about and one time my Aunt Vidette said a thing at Thanksgiving and my mother left the room.”
“And I made a decision when I was about thirty that I was not going to make my mother tell me. Because she clearly did not want to. And I decided that letting her not tell me was the kindest thing I could do for her, and I did it for forty-four years, Willa. Forty-four years I sat in that kitchen and I never asked.”
Then she looked at me.
“And now a stranger in Sioux Falls has told my daughter, who told me on the telephone at midnight, and I find out I got it wrong. She wasn’t protecting a secret. She was waiting for somebody to be brave enough to ask her, and I was the one person who should have and I was so busy being considerate —”
She didn’t finish it.
I said, “Mom, she left the calendars. She left them in the house where somebody would find them.”
And my mother said, “She left them for a granddaughter. Not for me. She knew I wouldn’t look.”
That’s the part of this that doesn’t have a happy version. My mother spent forty-four years being gentle with a woman who needed the opposite, and there’s no way to give her that back.
Then, eleven days later, my sister Roselle called and said, “Have you seen the Facebook group?”
The story had gone around a second time — the calendars, the eighty-six, the maternity home. Somebody in the comments had started a group to find the women.
Four hundred members in a week.
And people were posting names.
Full names. Their mothers’ names, their aunts’ names, other people’s mothers’ names — I saw a comment that said my mom was at that home in 1974 and never told anybody, she’s still alive, does anyone have a list?
Somebody had photographed a page of a calendar off my original post, enlarged the letters, and started a public spreadsheet trying to match initials to names.
I had done this. I had put a photograph of a pie card online in January and by April there were strangers building a database of women who had been sent away in 1974 and had spent fifty years not being found.
Gudrun called me on a Sunday and did not say hello.
“Take it down,” she said. “Willa. Today. There is a woman in that group posting about her mother-in-law who does not know her mother-in-law was ever pregnant, and if you don’t stop this, somebody is going to find out at eighty-one years old, from Facebook, that everybody knows.”
PART 4
I took my post down on a Sunday afternoon and it did nothing at all.
That’s the thing nobody understands about this. The post was gone in four minutes. The screenshots were not. The group was not mine, the spreadsheet was not mine, and the two hundred and eleven news aggregator sites that had scraped my grandmother’s story in January were not mine either.
I called a lawyer, because I am my grandmother’s granddaughter and I thought there was a rule somewhere that would help.
Her name is Delphine Achterberg-Nnamdi and she took ninety minutes and charged me for forty.
The recipe, she said, isn’t property. A list of ingredients is a statement of fact and facts aren’t protected. My grandmother’s words — the actual sentences on that card, the phrase cold enough to hurt — those are hers, and I hold them now, and I could send takedowns to the sites that reproduced the card image.
That was it. That was the whole toolkit.
“The calendars are yours as objects,” she said. “The information in them isn’t anybody’s. And Willa — I need to say this clearly — you published it. Voluntarily. There is no legal mechanism in this country for un-publishing a true thing about a dead woman.”
I said what about the living ones. What about eighty-six women.
And she said, “Legally? They have no claim against you. Morally, that’s a different office.”
So we did the only thing there was.
Roselle and I and my cousin Junia spent six weeks doing the least glamorous work I have ever done in my life. We filed takedowns on the card image, which worked about half the time. We reported the spreadsheet, which came down and went back up under a different account. We wrote, individually, to four hundred and eleven group members.
We got maybe a third of them. The group finally shut down in June when Facebook removed it, and I have no idea which of the eleven reports did it.
And in the middle of all of that, the second thing happened.
A production company called. A real one. They wanted the pie card. They wanted my grandmother’s face on the cover of a book with a foreword by somebody, and a documentary, and there was a number in the email that had a comma in it that I had not previously had occasion to think about.
And the woman on the phone said, warmly, “And of course the real heart of it is the maternity home. That’s the story.”
I said no.
Then my aunt Vidette’s son — who is fifty-one and who I have met perhaps nine times — sent a letter through his own attorney claiming that Odalie’s recipes and personal papers were assets of an estate that had been informally divided, and that any commercial exploitation required agreement of all the descendants, and that he was prepared to be reasonable.
He wanted to say yes. He was very clear about that in the second letter.
So there it was. Eighty-six women whose names were in a banana box in my basement, a production company with a comma in its number, and a cousin who was prepared to be reasonable.
And I could not stop any of it by myself, because the story was already out and it was mine that put it there.
I drove up to Duluth in May and sat in Gudrun Halvorsen-Reyes’s living room and told her all of it and said, “I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”
And Gudrun — who is fifty-eight, who was nineteen in that kitchen, who has a daughter she has never met — said:
“Willa. You’ve been asking the wrong people this whole time. You’ve asked a lawyer, and your mother, and me.”
“Then who?”
She got up and got her purse and took out a recipe card in blue ballpoint that she has carried since 1987.
“You go ask the eighty-six,” she said. “It was never your grandmother’s story. She only ever held half of it. That’s the whole point of the card, and you of all people should have worked that out by now.”
PART 5
Here’s what we did, and it took fourteen months.
We did not publish anything. We built a door.
The Odalie Registry is one page. There is no list on it, and there never will be. It says: if you were placed at a household in this county through the Bethesda Home work program between 1966 and 1981, and you would like to know whether your name is in a set of calendars kept by the woman you were sent to, you can write to this address.
You write in. Roselle checks the box. If you’re in it, we tell you what’s written — which is a letter, a time, and sometimes a first name with a check mark, and that’s all it ever was.
We don’t tell anybody else. Ever. Not the other women, not their children, not us at a Thanksgiving table.
Forty-one women have written in. Twenty-nine were in the calendars.
Three of them asked to be connected to each other, and we did that, and Gudrun runs that part because Gudrun should.
The rest just wanted to know that a record existed that had them in it. Several of them said some version of the same thing, which is that they had spent fifty years being a girl nobody wrote down.
The production company went away when I told them there was no list. That was the whole conversation. Turns out a story about a pie isn’t worth a comma without eighty-six names attached to it.
My cousin’s attorney went away when Delphine sent him one letter pointing out that a recipe is not an asset because it is not property, and that his client was welcome to the tin.
He hasn’t spoken to me since and I’ve made my peace with that.
The calendars are in a climate-controlled box at the county historical society under a fifty-year restriction, which was Perpetua Skarsgaard-Boone’s idea. She’s seventy-eight and she drove up for the meeting and told the archivist, in front of all of us, “In fifty years everybody in those pages will be dead and it’ll be history. Right now it’s still somebody’s life.”
The Bethesda Home records themselves — the actual adoption files — are still sealed. Nothing we did touched that. Two of the forty-one women are in a state process that has taken them nine and eleven years respectively, and one is doing it through DNA, and that is the part of this story with no good ending and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Perpetua’s own daughter found her, in 2019, through a spit test in a tube. She says it is the only time in her life anybody has ever found her without her having to explain herself first.
My mother came to the historical society meeting.
She sat at the end of the table and didn’t say anything for an hour, and then, when the archivist asked whether anyone wanted to add anything to the accession record, my mother said, “Yes. Write down that her name was Odalie Marthe Vandermeer, and that she was seventeen in 1943, and that she never got to say so out loud in her own house.”
And then she said, “That’s my mother. Spell it right.”
She and I are all right. It took most of a year. She sold the house on Kirkendall Street in September and kept one thing out of the kitchen, and it wasn’t the tin.
It was the apron.
The card, though.
I’ve had four hundred people tell me to finish it. Publishers, strangers, one very sincere woman at a church who said it would be closure.
Here’s why I won’t, and it isn’t sentiment.
Because in October of 1966 a seventeen-year-old girl stood in a front hall holding a laundry basket she was not going to be allowed to carry, and a forty-year-old woman took it out of her hands and said sit down, are you hungry — and then spent the next four decades building a machine, out of flour and a pharmacy calendar and one deliberately unfinished sentence, whose entire purpose was to make sure that no girl who came through that kitchen ever left it without a reason to come back.
The instruction is eleven words. Anybody can look it up.
The card is not a recipe and it never was. It’s a door she propped open in 1966 and refused to shut for forty years, and I am not going to be the one who closes it.
I made the pie in July, for the first time since she died, in my own kitchen, with my daughter Bertille, who is nine and who has flour in her eyebrows in the photograph.
I got three lines into the lattice and I stopped.
She said, “Mom. What comes next?”
And I put my hands over her hands.
“Come here,” I said. “I’ll show you the rest.”
