During those long lonely days when Mr. Smith was away in Washington, Mrs. Smith perfected the frozen pie. She did not particularly care for pie, truth be told, but Mrs. Smith was a sensualist and baking was her only means of expression, and in her experience few culinary creations caused the stir of twittering delight that pies did. Therefore she set herself the task of recreating her pies as convenient, readymade vessels of such delight for America's harried modern housewife, less as a potential business enterprise than as a means of spreading a personal evangel of sensory euphoria, the dampening of which, she speculated, was prone to cause unsightly goiters in otherwise handsome women. To her surprise, the pies became an immediate success. What had started as an exercise in pastry sublimation became a vocation and eventually something of an obligation. Pie lovers clamored. Their demands became increasingly shrill and assumed an alarming tone of lustful demand. Mrs. Smith obliged, creating new lines, branching out into carrot cakes, cobblers. As word of the success of her line of ready-to-heat pies reverberated through the moribund frozen foods industry, lower quality upstarts sprang out of nowhere to claim their slice of the pie market, and Mrs. Smith was forced to cut corners, to tighten her production methods and at times, to her acute discomfort, to settle for less than the very best ingredients. The pitiless demands of the pie game exhausted her, and the making of pies had long since ceased being that indulgence of the senses it had originally been. Her husband still away more than he was home, and with the added strain of her burgeoning business empire, Mrs. Smith felt sensuality lacking in her life even more strongly than before. So, without ever consciously deciding to, Mrs. Smith began taking lovers.

Once her oven reached 400 degrees, Mrs. Smith was ready to bake, and bake she did! The unmistakable ripening of the fruit vendor's affections surprised her and the sugar man was terribly sweet to her. She did it in a cloud of flour on the floor of her test kitchen with the man who periodically spot-checked her bubbling cherry vats. There was a tawdry afternoon in the studio when she at last succumbed to the ardent lip-licking gaze of the burly gentleman who photographed her serving suggestions. From one particularly erotic encounter sprang the inspiration for an entire line of deep dish pies. Consumers noted with pleasure that her cream pies were even creamier, her crusts flakier, her fruit pies swollen with sweet sweet juices. The buying public and pie aficionados happily noted a dramatic reversal of Mrs. Smith's recent product declines. Mrs. Smith's pies seemed somehow to embody the precipitous plunge into outright salaciousness to which Mrs. Smith herself had surrendered. Indulging in a slice seemed to place one in a voluptuous realm that occupied one's stunned sensual faculties long after the dessert was consumed. To eat a Mrs. Smith's pie became an act of carnal gratification that carried with it a host of destabilizing social and cultural implications. Conservative and puritan moral scolds took notice and there rumbled a groundswell of anxiety over the power of the pies to deform the minds of children and malleable adults and turn them away from quotidian responsibilities toward a shocking and unmanageable hedonism.

It all ended abruptly, though, when Mrs. Smith's VP of Marketing, a man of poetic sensibilities whose erotic interests were far removed from both Mrs. Smith and her oversweet concoctions (he preferred the more piquant and savory flavors associated with the robust dockworkers he was in the habit of befriending in earthy waterfront saloons), rebuffed her invitation to "sample her new custard" and after a struggle in the rafters above the production floor Mrs. Smith took a tragic but perfectly graceful dive into several thousand gurgling gallons of hot apple filling. The pies containing Mrs. Smith were, naturally, never sold to customers, although several dozen such "special edition" pies somehow found their way onto the shadowy subterranean pie black market and into the greedy hands of some of the world's richest and most demanding voluptuaries, and one can assume their normally unquenchable carnal appetites were slaked in the most satisfying manner by these one-of-a-kind desserts.