You sit at the bar of the newly opened Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff & Pett nursing your fourth whiskey soda, and considering a fifth, when a woman—with a blanket of black hair—breezes by you trailing the scent of jasmine and campfire. She takes a stool at the end of the bar, declines the bartender’s offer of a cocktail.
“I’m meeting someone,” she says. “I’ll wait.”
You watch as she looks pensively around the lounge looking for the man, or woman, who you deduce is not coming. At the fifteen minute mark she takes a book out of her bag and puts on her reading glasses. Then motions for the bartender, you hear her say, “A glass of burgundy, please.” At the thirty minute mark, you walk over, say, “Mind if I join you? It seems I’ve been stood up.” She looks up from her book, takes off her glasses, considers you.
“No women with two eyes in her head would stand up a man like you,” she says.
“How about one eye?” you ask. She laughs.
“Funny, too,” she says, and motions to the seat next to hers.
“Another?” you ask, nodding toward her empty glass. “Or we could eat.”

The hostess shows you to a table near the fireplace, unlit since it is July. You order a bottle of Burgundy; Steak Horatio—the house speciality for yourself—rare; the New York steak for her. “How would the lady like her steak cooked?” the waiter asks. “Burn it and bring me the ashes,” she says. You laugh, the waiter is unamused.

You tell her you are a lawyer; live in a house on the South Hill; have been married twice, divorced once. You notice that she ignores the fact that you have a wife at home. She tells you she lives in a one bedroom attic-apartment in Browne’s Addition. She is a divorcée. She works at Past-Time, the feminist bookstore, on Lincoln, in the shadow of the Steam Plant. She tells you how when she expressed concern over the fact that she was nearing fifty, the girl interviewing her said, “We don’t care how old you are, we only care that you’re well-read, liberated, and down with cause (the cause, she tells you, being the ERA). You study her, say, “I thought you were much younger.” Her eyes flash and you smell it again—campfire.
“Do you camp?” you ask.
“Never,” she answers.

With each bite of steak and swallow of wine you reveal more about yourselves to the other, soon are navigating the deep waters of abandonment, infidelity, growing older, love lost and never found. You watch as she waves her hands through the air to emphasize her point. Watch as she laughs, as she frowns. She could be my third act, you think.
You tell her you were once enamored with a woman who was not your wife, she tells you that she only attracts men whose personalities are defined by ist.
“I don’t understand,” you say.
“Ageist, egoist, narcissist, sexist,” she says. “I’ve slept with them all.” As she finishes her sentence, the fireplace roars to life.

The waiter returns, suggests dessert. Says, “We have a fabulous Burnt Cream.”
“How about pie?” you ask.
“We don’t serve pie,” the waiter says with a sigh.
“Meno male!” she exclaims and laughs.
“That sounds like my wi—” She shoots you a look and you see flames in the brown of her eyes. You start over. “Why, don’t you like pie?”
“Strange things happen when I eat it.”
“Like?” you say as you splash more wine into her glass.
She takes a sip, tells you how she once ate an entire huckleberry pie—made by a woman known as the Witch of the Kaniksu. It was meant to reignite the dwindling flame between her mother and father. Her father didn’t come home, her mother threw the pie in the sink. When she, having skipped dinner to avoid her mother’s rage, wandered into the kitchen and saw the smash of purple, she ate forkful after forkful until all that remained was a lavender stain on the white porcelain.
“And if you ate pie now?” you ask. “What could happen?”
“Anything,” she says.

You let this settle, nod, motion to the waiter and ask for the check. She offers to go Dutch, you decline.

You walk her to her car, a sky blue VW Bug. Across the river the lights and sounds of the Expo are competing with each other for attention. You look at her, she looks at you.
“Now what?” she asks.
You lean toward her, she closes her eyes, lifts her chin as if expecting your lips to land on hers. Instead, your mouth brushes against her ear and you whisper, “Pie.”

Carla Crujido is the author of the short story collection, The Strange Beautiful (Chin Music Press). Her work has appeared in Moss, Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Yellow Medicine Review, Ricepaper Magazine, and elsewhere. Carla is the Assistant Editor at River Styx Magazine, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Portland, Oregon.