Epilogue
Sloane
One month later…
December arrives the way Vermont always delivers December, without apology and with complete commitment, the first real snow coming overnight so that the orchard wakes up transformed, the bare branches holding their white accumulation with the patient beauty of things that have stopped being surprised by the cold.
I stand on the farmhouse porch with my hot chocolate, which has cinnamon and made by Beck, who has memorized the exact ratio I prefer without being told and without making a thing of it, and I have stopped performing indifference about this because performing indifference requires energy I would rather spend on things that matter.
The fact that someone knows how I like my hot chocolate and makes it that way without commentary is, I have decided, one of the more quietly revolutionary things that has happened to me this year.
It destroys me a little every morning. I have made my peace with that.
The orchard is sleeping. The trees in their winter dormancy, bare branches holding the new snow, the whole property hushed and patient in the way that only dormant things can be, storing everything they need for the season coming after this one.
The drainage system Beck redesigned runs correctly beneath the frost line, the companion plantings for the Gravenstein are ordered from the Burlington nursery and scheduled for early spring, and the cidery expansion design is pinned to the barn wall where I look at it every morning and think, against my consistent resistance to admitting when someone else's idea is correct, that it is genuinely not terrible.
We are applying for a state agricultural grant.
Margot is helping with the application because Margot Byrne helps with everything that has a form associated with it, which is both a profound resource and a signal I have been watching with increasing concern because people who need to be needed in that specific way are usually using the need to cover something else.
The loom came up from the basement in the second week of November.
This was not a dramatic event. Beck was doing something with the drainage schematics at the kitchen table and I said, without particular preamble, "I'm going to get the loom from the basement," and he said "I'll move the couch to make room," and that was the entirety of the negotiation.
It sits in the farmhouse living room now, positioned where the afternoon light hits it best, which Beck identified without being asked, moving the couch with the practical attentiveness of someone who understands light and space as professional languages.
I work it in the evenings, the shuttling rhythm of something I taught my hands a long time ago and that my hands remembered without requiring relearning.
The textiles are abstract and architectural, reds and deep golds and the specific amber of October afternoon light through apple leaves, colors I have been looking at every harvest season and apparently storing somewhere for later use.
Iris called them luminous, which is the highest register of her vocabulary for visual work, and has asked to display them at the gallery in February.
I said I would think about it. I have thought about it.
The answer is yes. I am easing into the yes at my own pace, which Beck has learned is a valid pace and does not require acceleration.
On the couch across from the loom, Beck carves.
It is our evening arrangement, arrived at organically over several weeks of being in the same room without requiring the occupation to be identical.
The cats arrange themselves across every available surface according to some feline hierarchy that I have observed for years without cracking the organizational logic.
Pirate presides from the back of the armchair with the regal detachment of a creature who has decided she is in charge and sees no reason to revisit the question.
The group chat is active when I come back inside with my empty mug, the phone lighting up on the kitchen counter in the particular rapid-fire sequence of the Willowbrook Widows Club conducting one of its morning conversations without me.
Iris: I have a structural question about our group name. Two of the four members currently have active romantic situations. Does the name require revisiting?
Gemma: Fiancé, for the record. Not just a romantic situation. A legally intended romantic situation.
Sloane, typing: The name stays. It is legacy branding and we are not rebranding.
Margot: Agreed. The name retains accuracy for the full membership.
Iris: Margot, the name is only accurate for you at this point. Which means the group is effectively named after your specific circumstance.
Margot: I am aware of that. The name stays.
Gemma: Margot. We are asking with genuine warmth and complete sincerity: are you okay?
Margot: I am completely fine! I have seventeen outstanding festival post-event items, a vendor satisfaction survey to compile, and the inn renovation project coordination starting this week. I am exceptionally busy and therefore thriving.
I stare at Margot's text for a moment. I am completely fine.
The phrasing of a woman running the same program I ran for two years, the bright insistent declaration that everything is managed and under control and does not require examination.
I know the syntax of it intimately because I used it constantly and it costs more than it looks like from the outside.
One day, I think. One day someone is going to stand in front of Margot Byrne and see through that word with the clear-eyed persistence of someone who refuses to take it at face value. I hope, when that happens, she has enough left in reserve to let them.
The post-festival cleanup meeting happens at Iris's gallery on a Tuesday, all four of us around the table with Margot's post-event report binders, which are color-coded and tabbed and contain a level of documentation that suggests Margot experiences events primarily as data collection opportunities.
She is distributing the vendor satisfaction summaries when her phone rings.
She answers. I watch her face perform a full range of micro-expressions in approximately four seconds: surprise, something that might be recognition, something that is definitely not neutrality, and then the careful construction of professional composure reassembling over all of it like a lid going back on something pressurized.
"The inn renovation architect confirmed for tomorrow," she says, setting the phone down with the deliberate placement of someone managing their own hands. "Eli Voss. Early arrival. I'll need to adjust the coordination schedule."
"Is that a problem?" Iris asks, with the particular gentle attentiveness she deploys when she has noticed something she does not want to spook.
"Not remotely." Margot straightens her already-straight binder. "We met briefly at a conference two years ago. A professional acquaintance."
"What kind of professional acquaintance?" Gemma asks, with the direct specificity that makes her an excellent diagnostician and an occasionally uncomfortable friend.
Margot aligns her pen parallel to the binder edge with geometric precision.
"The kind where I delivered an assessment of his design philosophy in front of approximately two hundred conference attendees.
I suggested that his work had the emotional resonance of a municipal parking structure.
I was at the time operating on insufficient sleep and the specific grief of being two months out from David's funeral.
" She pauses. "He did not respond well."
The gallery is very quiet for a moment.
"Margot," Gemma says, in the tone of someone who has just received information that significantly updates her model of a situation.
"It was two years ago," Margot says, with the crisp finality of someone closing a browser tab.
"We are both professionals. The inn renovation is a significant project for Willowbrook and I intend to manage it with complete efficiency.
Now, the vendor satisfaction scores for the cider tent specifically—"
I look at Gemma. Gemma looks at Iris. Iris looks across the gallery to where Cal is sitting in the corner with his notebook, occupying space the way Cal Whitaker always occupies space, quietly and with complete attentiveness to everything happening around him, the permanent observer.
He catches my eye and mouths two words with the unhurried certainty of a novelist who recognizes a setup when he sees one.
She's doomed.
I nod. The assessment is accurate.
"Be careful, Margot," I say, and I say it in the voice I use when I mean something without wanting to make a production of meaning it.
She looks up from the vendor scores. "About what specifically?"
"The ones who get under your skin when you're not watching for it. They're the ones who rearrange everything."
Margot laughs, and the laugh is bright and slightly hollow and perfectly constructed, the exact laugh I used to produce when someone said something true that I was not prepared to receive.
"Nobody is getting under anything. I am coordinating a renovation project.
It is entirely professional and entirely manageable. "
I look at Gemma. Gemma looks at Iris. We do not say anything else because we do not need to, and because some things have to be figured out in real time, and because Margot Byrne will arrive at her own reckoning on her own timeline, and when she does I intend to be one of the people in the parking lot when she comes out the door.
That is what the Willowbrook Widows Club actually is, underneath the legacy branding. It is four women who show up for each other's parking lot moments. That is the whole function and it is sufficient.