Chapter 4
Four
Wren
Monday morning, before the shop’s even open, I make the mistake of opening the binder.
Dot dropped it on my counter at the end of the breakfast, both hands, like she was handing over a baby or a bomb.
HARVEST FESTIVAL, the spine says, in Marigold’s block capitals, the letters gone soft where twenty-two years of thumbs have worn at them.
I’ve been circling it since yesterday like a dog I’m not sure of.
Now I sit down with my coffee and open it, and the dog bites.
It’s not a binder. It’s a life’s work. Tabs down the side for the bake tent, the dessert auction, the vendors, the volunteers, the schedule, the road closure, the thing with the mayor I don’t understand yet.
Order forms going back two decades. A laminated map of the town square with penciled boxes for every stall, drawn, rubbed out, and drawn again in her hand.
Phone numbers for a flour wholesaler, a man named Gus who does the tables, a woman named Pat who must never, underlined three times, be seated near the Pelhams.
There’s a checklist for the week of the festival, front and back, forty-some lines.
I have done exactly none of them, because until yesterday I had no idea they were mine.
Book Gus early, he forgets. Confirm the generator.
Chase the raffle prizes. Signs. Bunting.
Two hundred paper boats for the chowder stall, which, what chowder stall?
Nobody has said one goddamn word to me about a chowder stall.
And the notes. They’re the thing that gets me. In the margins, on sticky tabs, on the backs of receipts, all in her hand.
Start the pumpkin loaves the Wednesday before, or you’ll cry.
Double the shortbread. You always think you won’t need to. You will.
Whatever they offer for the lemon tart, hold out for more. It’s the best thing you make. Don’t let them have it cheap.
I read that last one twice. My throat does the thing it does most mornings now.
She wrote all this for herself. Not for me. She had no notion that a niece she saw twice a year would wind up on this stool with her coffee going cold, trying to read a whole town out of a dead woman’s handwriting.
Marigold was my mom’s sister, the fun one, the one who sent parcels that smelled of vanilla and got me sugar-high at Christmas.
I always meant to visit more. Everyone always means to visit more.
Then you get a phone call, and by then it’s too late to mean anything.
What’s left of a whole person is a shop, a sourdough starter older than you are, and a binder you have no idea how to carry.
A month. I’ve got a month to turn into someone who can do this.
I make myself shut the festival binder and open the other book, the one I’ve been dodging worse. The accounts.
That goes about how I expect. Marigold left me a shop with good bones and thin blood.
The bakery keeps busy enough, the regulars are loyal, but the numbers only just kiss at the bottom of the page, month to month, nothing spare for a bad week or a broken anything.
There’s a note in this book too, tucked in the back, newer than the rest, her hand gone shaky.
The festival keeps us black through winter. Don’t skip it, love.
So that settles it. It isn’t only pride. I need this to work the same as she did. Festival weekend on its own used to carry the shop clear to spring.
No pressure.
I’m still sitting there doing sums that won’t add up when someone raps on the front glass, and God help me, I know before I look up. Nobody else knocks like they’re doing me a favor by turning up.
Cal. Grinning through the door with a foil-covered plate held up like a trophy.
I let him in because it’s that or listen to him knock all morning.
“Peace offering.” He sets it on the counter. “For the scones. I’ve been thinking about your scones on my boots for two days. Felt only right.”
I peel back the foil. Underneath is a tray of lemon bars. Sort of. They’re the right idea. The lemon’s pulled away from the base on half of them, the powdered sugar’s melted to wet patches, and one corner is a brown that suggests a smoke alarm was involved.
“You made these,” I say.
“Eli made most of these.” Not a flicker of shame. “I did the lemon part. He talked me through it over the phone. Rhett supervised.”
“What does Rhett supervising look like?”
“He ate four and told me they were ugly.” Cal picks one up, studies it, sets it back. “They are ugly. But they taste okay, and I wanted to bring you a thing that wasn’t a repair bill.”
The trouble with him is that it would be easier if he were only a pretty face and a big grin, simple to set on a shelf and ignore.
Instead, he stood in the firehouse kitchen with his prime on the phone, making lemon bars for a woman who wouldn’t shake his hand, and carried them to me with his whole heart in a foil tray.
I eat one. It does taste okay. I’m annoyed about that too.
He wanders while I eat, hands in everything, easy in the shop like he’s never once been told no in a building.
He finds the display shelf that’s tilted since the day I got here, the one I’ve been holding level with a folded coaster.
Crouches. Does something to the bracket with the multi-tool off his belt.
Sets it straight. He doesn’t announce it or wait for a thank-you.
He just fixes it and moves on to poke at my empty chalkboard.
And I stand there with a lemon bar in my hand, feeling the fight go out of me by one more inch.
I don’t thank him for the shelf. I don’t know how to thank a man for noticing a thing I’d stopped seeing.
Back home, help always came with a receipt, a favor logged, a thing quietly owed.
Cal fixes my shelf, eats an ugly lemon bar, doesn’t seem to be keeping any score at all.
And I have no idea what to do with a person built like that.
“What’s all this?” He’s turned the binder around, flipping tabs, low whistle. “Marigold’s bible. Dot really got you for the whole thing.”
“Dot gets everybody, apparently.”
“Dot could talk a cat into a bath.” He lands on the map, the little penciled stalls, and goes quiet for a second. “You’re really going to do it.”
“I don’t have a choice. And I want to.” I take the binder back before he can shuffle twenty years out of order. “She did it twenty-two years. I’m not going to be the one who lets it fall over in year one.”
He holds the look a beat too long, quieter underneath the grin.
“You won’t let it fall over,” he says. Like he’s known me longer than three days. Like it’s just a fact he’s already got filed.
Then the grin’s back. “You’ll need help. Setup, hauling, taste-testing. I’m a professional taste-tester.”
“You’re a professional nuisance.”
“That too. Point is, we’re right next door. You’ve got a whole firehouse of idiots who lift heavy things for fun.” He backs toward the door, so he doesn’t have to quit looking pleased with himself. “Say the word, sugar.”
“The word is goodbye, Cal.”
“See? Natural.” And he’s gone, out into the Monday, leaving me with a tray of ugly lemon bars, a binder the size of my two hands, and a shop that lives or dies on one month I don’t know how to run.
I look at the lemon bars a while. Then I get out Marigold’s recipe box, find the card for the tart, the best thing you make, and start reading it like she’s at my shoulder telling me not to rush it.
That night I make my first practice tart. It’s a disaster. I make a second one. Also, a disaster, in a brand-new way, and I end up standing in my kitchen at nine o’clock eating my own failure off the spatula, because I can’t make myself throw her recipe in the trash.
The shop’s gone quiet around me. But it doesn’t smell only of sugar and flour now. There’s cedar in it, warm and low under the sweetness. Cal, lingering the same as the shelf he set straight, without being asked, without keeping any score at all.
I put the card back exactly where Marigold kept it, lock the door, and tell myself it means nothing. A busy neighbor. A nice man with a big grin. A small town doing what small towns do to a person who forgot to say no fast enough.
A month. A shop that lives or dies on it. A lemon tart I can’t get right yet. And three firemen across the road who keep finding reasons to come through my door, one of whom I can already pick out of a pitch-dark room by his smell alone.
I’m in trouble. I just haven’t worked out yet how much.