Chapter 17
Election day came in clear and hot, one of those high-summer Montana mornings with the mountains standing up sharp enough to cut paper. By eight AM. the Grange hall smelled like coffee, cinnamon rolls, and democracy at work.
The polls were inside. The widows of the Shoemacher fire were outside at two long folding tables set up on either side of the sidewalk leading inside. They were exactly three feet past the legal electioneering distance, a measurement performed by Tessa with a contractor’s tape.
Officially it was a bake sale for the school’s art programs. Unofficially, every voter in the valley had to walk a gauntlet of Grace’s cinnamon rolls, Molly’s seed packets, and Rose pouring coffee with a smile that could be seen from space.
Not one word of politics was spoken. But their message was loud and clear.
Sunny spent the morning ferrying the valley’s oldest residents to the polls in her minivan, which smelled of goldfish crackers and fruit juice, a fact her passengers found either scandalous or delightful with no middle ground.
She picked up Ruth Sanger at lunchtime, peak voting hour in Cobbler Cove, and Ruth emerged from the van like a head of state arriving at a summit.
She worked beside the bake-sale gauntlet for forty-five minutes, telling stories about how much Cobbler Cove had changed for the better in the past few years, broadly hinting that Bonnie Watson was the reason for the recent improvements and growth in the town.
Presley had set up at the end of the bake-sale table with her sketchbook and a hand-lettered sign reading PORTRAITS $5, and was doing brisk business sketching voters in two minutes flat while their pie was being boxed up.
Madison handled the cash box and the quality control.
Both sets of twins—Olive and Owen, and Harris and Jenson—had been assigned to Jack at the playground two blocks away from the Grange, by unanimous vote of every adult present.
Sunny watched it all between van runs, and she would have called it a perfect morning if her purse hadn’t been so heavy.
She was carrying two envelopes now. The linen one from the bank in Montenegro, eleven days unsigned.
And since Friday night, a plain white one with her name on it in Hank’s careful hand.
A woman’s purse was supposed to hold her lipstick and her keys.
Hers was weighed down with other people’s endings.
Hank came between patients to vote at noon.
He stood in the line going up the steps, spoke quietly to people who spoke to him, and on his way out he bought a cinnamon roll he didn’t eat.
He tipped his cowboy hat to the bake-sale table in general, didn’t look at her, and was gone in under ten minutes total.
Ruth Sanger watched him walk to his truck. Then she turned and looked at Sunny with her head tipped, like a robin listening for a worm moving under the grass. She said nothing at all.
But from Ruth, silence was a shout.
Sunny drove Ruth back to her white frame house at four o’clock after the woman had put in a full shift at the bake-sale table. Ruth waited until they were past the diner and committed to the route before she struck.
“I’ve been telling this valley your story all summer, you know,” Ruth said, hands folded on her pocketbook, eyes front, in the tone of a woman discussing the weather.
“Yours and the doctor’s. Best story I’ve heard in years.
The settled doctor and the redheaded accountant.
Folks around here ask after the two of you the way they used to ask after their soap operas.
” A pause that filled Sunny with dread. “Lately you’ve quit giving me anything to work with. ”
“Ruth.”
“Eight minutes,” Ruth said. “He stood in that line eight minutes today and looked at everything in the parking lot but you. I had a husband for forty-one years, and I can read a man.”
She looked over at Sunny then, and her old eyes weren’t gossip-bright. They were just old, and kind, and terribly clear.
“Here’s the thing nobody tells you about stories, since I’m the only one left around here who knows it.
The middle is the only part you get a say in.
Beginnings happen to you, and endings happen to you, but the middle is the part where you have to stand up and live on purpose.
And the saddest stories I ever carried around this town .
. .” she faced front again “ . . . weren’t the ones that ended bad.
They were the ones where both fools sat in the middle, waiting for the other one to turn the page. ”
Sunny drove the last three blocks with her hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel and her eyes stinging.
“Thank you for the ride,” Ruth said at her curb, gathering her pocketbook. “I bought one of your girl’s portraits, by the way. She drew me twenty years younger than I am, and I tipped her an extra five for lying so well.”
She got out, then leaned back in the open window, and for once in her long, loud life delivered a line to an audience of exactly one. “Don’t make me tell your story sad, Honey. I’m too old to do it justice.”
Dale Tolliver worked the parking lot the remainder of the afternoon, shaking hands beside a yellow sign that had spent the summer fading to the color of weak lemonade.
People were polite to him, Sunny noticed.
Polite the way folks are polite at a viewing.
Kind words, brief stops, nobody lingering.
He’d built his whole campaign on a town’s exhaustion, and the town, somewhere between Ruth’s stories and Bonnie’s audit and Rose’s voice ringing off the Grange rafters, seemed to have gotten its second wind.
Cobbler Cove counted its ballots by hand, in public, the way it had since statehood.
The Grange filled up after supper with people waiting to hear who’d won.
Watson people and Tolliver people and the undeclared all ate the same pie and were civil to one another, talking and laughing, while the ballots were counted.
Through the open doorway to the side room, the counting board could be seen at a long table under the good lights, four sworn volunteers calling and tallying in a murmur, watched by one observer from each side.
Children fell asleep on coats in the corner. Rose kept the coffee coming. Every so often the murmur from the side room would shift its rhythm, and four hundred people would stop chewing at once. Then the rhythm would settle, and the pie eating and chitchat would resume.
Counting took longer this year than anyone could remember, which either meant the turnout had been much higher than usual or the vote was so close they were recounting it. Speculation ran rampant in the outer room as to which one it was.
At ten past nine the tallying stopped and a buzz of anticipation went up in the hall. The county clerk stepped out and taped a single sheet of paper to the wall at the front of the Grange hall
The current Grange president, Walter Meeks, read out in a booming voice, “Watson, 1,409. Tolliver, 612.”
The hall went up like a hayfield in August.
Bonnie had carried the town by a wide margin.
She’d carried the lake houses on either side of town.
She’d even won, by eleven votes, the ranch country comprising most of the valley where Dale’s signs had stood at the end of every driveway since April.
It meant some of the very folks who’d planted those signs had stood in a voting booth, alone with their conscience and their property taxes, and quietly voted for the woman who balanced the books.
Sunny stood in the middle of the noise with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes tearing up, and watched Bonnie Watson absorb a landslide win the way Bonnie absorbed everything.
She went stock still stared at the vote count for a few seconds, and said merely, “Well, then.”
The WoWS mobbed her all at once, and somewhere in the tangle of hugs and laughter was the first elected mayor of Cobbler Cove who had never once needed a man to tell her how to run it.
Gray got to her last, when the women finally let him through, and what he murmured against her hair made Bonnie’s smile go soft and her gaze go warm in a way that made Sunny’s heart ache in recognition.
When they finally pushed Bonnie in front of the podium and turned the microphone on, her entire victory speech ran four sentences.
“Thank you to everybody who voted. The polls may be closed, but the pie table isn’t, so eat up.
Town Hall opens at eight tomorrow morning, same as every morning.
And the books . . .” her voice wobbled exactly once, and she put it back level quickly, “. . . the books will remained balanced on my watch.”
Dale Tolliver never came to the Grange. Word went around in the way word went around this valley that he’d sat in his truck across the street until the count was read out, and then drove home with his headlights off.
Sunny found she had no desire to gloat at him.
He’d staked everything on a lie that Bonnie had cooked the town’s books.
That, and the comfortable story that nothing in Cobbler Cove had ever been wrong.
That Lucas Shoemacher was an innocent old man, and a bunch of widows were grieving too loud.
He’d lost on both counts tonight. Something in her, though, some instinct she’d developed when she’d become a forensic accountant, whispered to her that the story still had worse losses ahead of it.
She was beside the pie table when she saw Bonnie draw Hank toward the coat rack at the back of the hall away from the noise. She saw Bonnie’s face change from happiness into something regretful. Pained, even.
Sunny headed for her friend before she even stopped to think about it. Something was wrong, and it involved Hank. As she got closer, Bonnie spotted her and subtly tipped her chin toward Hank to indicate that he was involved in whatever bad news she was delivering to him.