10. Rafe
RAFE
Main Street disappears under a river of lederhosen by nine in the morning, and by noon I've lost count of how many strangers have shaken my hand and thanked me for keeping this town's economy alive, like I built the whole festival out of spite for the mine that closed instead of a business that needed customers.
I hate crowds on principle. There are too many bodies, too much noise coming from too many directions, no clean line of sight to any of the exits.
I work the festival anyway, because Ridgeline's name is stamped on every banner up and down the street, and because, though I'm not saying this part out loud to anyone, Jenna and the twins are here somewhere in the middle of it.
Dot Higgins has turned her cider stand into what can only be described as a hostile takeover of the entire event. She's got a hand-lettered sign the size of a door, a line eleven people deep, and an operation running with more precision than half the actual vendors the town paid to be here.
"You're welcome, by the way." She hands a customer their change without looking away from me. "I've sold four hundred cups since sunrise. Your cider's the only reason half these people are still upright."
"I didn't ask for a cut."
"Good, because you're not getting one." She winks and turns back to the line, already shouting the next order before I've fully walked away.
I find Gunny near the pretzel booth, and the sight of him nearly stops me in the middle of the street. He's wearing actual lederhosen, suspenders and all, with a felt hat that has a feather in it he's clearly proud of.
"Don't."
"I haven't said anything."
"You're thinking it loud enough. I can hear it from here." He adjusts the hat with the seriousness of a man correcting a crooked picture frame. "This is heritage. This is culture. You wouldn't understand. You're wearing a plain shirt like a coward."
"I'm wearing a shirt that doesn't have suspenders sewn into shorts."
"Your loss." He hands me a pretzel the size of a dinner plate without asking if I wanted one, which is exactly the kind of thing Gunny does, and goes back to heckling a rival brewery's booth two spaces down with the enthusiasm of a man who's been waiting all year for this exact opportunity.
I find the twins by the ring toss, and I know it's them before I even see them, because I can hear Eli narrating his own performance to a growing cluster of amused strangers.
"Watch this. I have a system."
"You said that about the Christmas lights too," I say, coming up behind him.
"This system's better." He lines up a ring, throws it, misses by a wide margin, and doesn't miss a beat. "That was a warmup throw. The real throw is next."
Josie's turn comes a minute later, and her ring sails clean onto the third bottle from the left, a perfect, almost accidental arc that makes the booth operator actually applaud.
She claims her prize with both hands, a stuffed bear roughly the same size as she is, brown and slightly lopsided in the face in a way that makes it look permanently confused.
"His name is Biscuit Junior."
"Biscuit's going to have feelings about that."
"Biscuit doesn't read." She hugs the bear against her chest like it might otherwise escape. "He's got a little brother now. It's happening."
"Can you hold him? Just for a minute." Josie thrusts Biscuit Junior into my arms without waiting for an answer, already distracted by a face-painting booth two stalls down. "He doesn't like crowds either. You'll understand him."
I end up standing in the middle of Main Street holding a stuffed bear roughly the size of a toddler while Josie gets a butterfly painted on her cheek, and I catch at least three separate people slowing down to stare at the sight of me, arms still full of the lopsided bear, before I decide I've stopped caring what any of them think.
"You're good with him," Eli informs me solemnly, watching me hold the bear like I've passed some kind of test. "Not everyone can hold a bear right."
"There's a wrong way to hold a bear?"
"You'd be surprised."
For the next several hours I get dragged, with genuine physical enthusiasm, from booth to booth, Eli's hand wrapped around one of mine and Josie's around the other, the two of them narrating the entire festival like tour guides who've never once questioned their authority to do so.
"This is Rafe. He owns the brewery." Eli says it to anyone who'll listen, to strangers, to the funnel cake vendor, to a man selling handmade knives who clearly didn't ask. "We work there."
"You don't work there."
"I counted supplies once. That's basically working there."
Half the town watches this parade with open curiosity, eyebrows raised at the sight of Rafe Montgomery being towed through Oktoberfest by two eight-year-olds like he's their personal event coordinator, and I catch more than one knowing look aimed my way, the kind that used to make my skin crawl and today mostly just makes me tired in a way I don't fully mind.
"They've adopted you," Maggie says, appearing at my elbow somewhere near the pie contest with the amused expression of a woman who's been watching this unfold all day. "Might want to get used to it."
"I'm aware."
"You don't look upset about it."
Nothing I could say would improve on the truth, so I don't try, and Maggie laughs like she already knew I wouldn't.
The afternoon wears on in a blur of small, ordinary things I can't quite believe I'm enjoying.
I judge exactly one round of the pretzel contest at Eli's insistence, disqualifying his own entry for what I call structural creativity concerns and he calls robbery.
I lose two dollars to Josie at a ring toss booth she's suspiciously good at, for someone who claims she's never played before.
I eat a funnel cake standing up in the middle of the street, powdered sugar down the front of a shirt I'll never get clean again, and at some point in all of it I stop checking the exits every few minutes the way I usually do in a crowd this size.
"You've got sugar on your face," Eli tells me, delighted, pointing.
"Where?"
"Everywhere. It's very embarrassing."
"Thanks for the update."
"That's what friends are for." He says it so casually, so completely without weighing the word, that it lands somewhere in my chest I wasn't braced for, and I have to look away and pretend I'm checking on Josie instead of processing an eight-year-old calling me his friend like it's the most obvious fact in the world.
By evening the crowd thins into something quieter, string lights coming on overhead as the sky goes the color of a bruise healing, and I find Jenna near the hay bales at the edge of the fairground, laughing at something Maggie's saying, head tipped back, one hand pressed flat against her own chest like she's trying to keep the laugh from getting away from her entirely.
The twins are draped against a hay bale a few feet off, Eli still holding Biscuit Junior even though he'd never admit he wanted a turn, both of them heavy-eyed and swaying on their feet the specific way kids do right before they go down hard.
I stand there longer than I mean to, just watching.
It hits me somewhere around the fifth minute, quiet and strange, that I've spent an entire day surrounded by noise and crowds and strangers who all wanted a piece of my attention, and not once, not a single time since Dot's cider line this morning, have I wanted to disappear.
I don't know what to do with that, so I walk over instead.
"You survived," Jenna says, catching sight of me. "I wasn't sure lederhosen-adjacent crowds were your thing."
"They're not."
"And yet." She gestures at the general chaos of the fairground, string lights and stragglers and the last of the pretzel line. "You're still here."
"Ridgeline's name is on the banners."
"Sure. That's the reason." She says it lightly, but there's something underneath it, a question she's not quite asking out loud, and I don't have an answer ready that doesn't say more than I mean to.
Three days of festival prep swallowed whatever was supposed to happen after Gunny burst through that office door, one crisis stacked on the next until I never had five straight minutes alone with her.
I haven't forgotten where we left off. Judging by the careful way she's not quite looking at me either, neither has she.
Maggie excuses herself toward the pie table with the transparent tact of a woman giving two people room she thinks they need, and Jenna and I end up standing there together, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, watching the twins fight their own eyelids by the hay bale.
"They're not going to make it to the fireworks," she says.
"They'll wake up for the noise."
"That's either reassuring or terrifying, depending on how loud this town takes its fireworks."
I don't answer that one, because the honest answer involves things I'm not ready to explain, and a few minutes later the announcement crackles over the loudspeaker anyway, the crowd shifting and murmuring toward the open field at the edge of Main Street where the display's set to go off.
The first firework goes up with a low whistle, climbing slow, and I feel my whole body brace before it even bursts, shoulders locking, hands curling loosely at my sides.
It's announced and expected, nothing like the flat crack of a nail gun with no warning behind it.
My mind knows the difference. The rest of me takes a few seconds longer to catch up, muscle memory running its old program regardless of what my brain already understands.
I stay anyway.
Jenna's close enough beside me that our arms brush when the second firework goes up, gold sparks raining down over the ridge in a slow collapsing arc, and the twins startle awake against the hay bale just enough to watch with their mouths open, exactly the reaction she predicted.
The noise keeps coming, steady, and every burst still costs me something small, a flinch I mostly manage to keep on the inside, but each one costs a little less than the one before it.
"Okay?" Jenna asks, quiet, not looking away from the sky.
"Getting there."
"You don't have to stay for all of it. Nobody's grading attendance."
"I know." I keep my eyes on the sky too, mostly because it's easier than looking at her while I say the next part. "I want to stay for it anyway."
She doesn't push past that, doesn't ask what getting there means or how far there actually is, and something about the fact that she just lets the answer stand loosens something in my chest that's been wound tight since the moment the loudspeaker crackled to life.
The finale comes in a rush, three fireworks at once, gold and red and white bursting together over the ridge until the whole sky looks like it's on fire in the best possible way, and right there in the thick of it, without deciding to, without planning it the way I plan everything else, my hand finds hers.
Neither of us says anything.
Neither of us moves away.
Her fingers curl into mine like it was only ever a matter of time, and we stand together at the edge of the fairground with the whole sky coming apart in light above us, her hand warm in mine, the twins half asleep against the hay bale.
Somewhere behind us Gunny is loudly explaining lederhosen etiquette to a tourist who never asked, and somewhere closer, Josie mumbles something to Biscuit Junior in her sleep, and none of it feels like noise I need to escape from. It just sounds like a life that's finally going somewhere good.
For the first time in longer than I can put a number to, I don't feel like a man bracing for the next hit. I just feel like a man standing in a field, holding somebody's hand, watching fireworks, and for once not counting the minutes until it's safe to leave.