9. Zoe
ZOE
Pinewood Ridge takes its Harvest Festival the way other towns take a presidential inauguration, except with more livestock and a stricter dress code for the scarecrows.
Marge ran the whole thing from a folding chair on the bandstand, with a bullhorn she didn’t need and very obviously loved, assigning booths and settling disputes and announcing lost children like a woman reading the evening news.
I had been handed the clinic’s pet booth, which meant I spent the morning explaining that no, a goat cannot catch your cold, and adopting out a box of kittens that seemed to reproduce every time I looked away.
The square had transformed overnight into the town’s idea of splendor, all hay bales and pumpkins and a banner so old the wind had edited it down to ARVEST FEST. Hank Dooley manned a pie table and guarded it like a man braced for a raid.
Della ran the cake walk with the iron neutrality of a woman who has watched people cheat at a cake walk and doesn’t intend to be made a fool of twice.
Somewhere a fiddle was still deciding whether to be in tune.
A man in full camouflage planted himself at my booth and asked, with total sincerity, “Can a dog be gay?” I told him love is a mystery and his deposit on the kitten was nonrefundable. He appeared satisfied with both halves of that answer.
Asher had one objective, and he had been training for it all week. He had entered Bandit in the Ugliest Mutt contest.
I had tried to talk him out of it, on the grounds of his own feelings. Bandit, in Asher’s view, is the single most beautiful creature ever to limp across the surface of the earth, and I didn’t want him blindsided by a category that said otherwise out loud.
“It’s not an insult, Mom.” He explained this with the patience you reserve for a slow adult. “It’s a contest. You can’t win pretty. Everybody enters pretty. Ugly is strategy.”
The judging happened at noon, on a stage built of hay bales, and the judge, God help us all, was Jamie.
He stood in front of a lineup of the most aggressively homely dogs in three counties, holding a clipboard he didn’t need, and he judged them the way other men defuse ordnance.
He crouched at each one. He looked it gravely in the eye.
He made a note. The crowd adored it. He hated that the crowd adored it, which only made them adore it more.
The competition was fierce. There was a basset hound so loose in the skin he appeared to be slowly melting.
There was a Chihuahua wearing the face of a man who has read your emails.
There was a thing of no determinable breed that Hank swore was a dog and the rest of us privately suspected was three squirrels in a trench coat.
Jamie regarded each of them with the same grave respect, and the longer he held his face still, the funnier it became, until half the town was wiping its eyes and he had not so much as twitched.
When he reached Bandit, who wore her splint and an expression of total confidence, Asher lost the ability to contain himself.
“She’s the ugliest,” he announced, to the judge, to the crowd, to the open sky. “She’s the ugliest one here. You have to give it to her.”
Jamie crouched. He studied Bandit for a long, grave moment. Bandit licked his face. He didn’t flinch.
“This,” he said at last, “is a deeply unfortunate dog.”
It was the kindest thing anyone had ever said about Bandit, and Asher knew it, and his entire face detonated with joy.
She took first place. They gave her a purple ribbon the size of a dinner plate, and Asher pinned it to her splint.
Then he carried her around the square for the better part of an hour, introducing her to strangers as the winner, and to anyone who used the word ugly as my dog, and also a hero.
He spent what was left of the afternoon defending her honor against everyone who agreed she had won, because winning was excellent but the word ugly had begun, on reflection, to sting.
The llama got loose around two.
Nobody knew whose llama it was, which in Pinewood Ridge is not unusual.
It came through the petting-zoo fence as though the fence were a polite suggestion and made straight for the bouncy castle, where it planted itself among a battalion of shrieking toddlers like a furious gray god who had been summoned by mistake and intended to learn by whom.
What followed was the nearest thing to a riot that Pinewood Ridge allows itself.
Strollers were abandoned mid-roll. A funnel cake achieved flight.
Marge’s bullhorn supplied live commentary that helped no one and delighted everyone.
For one shining minute the entire social order of the town was the llama’s to command, and the llama, to its credit, appeared to understand this completely.
Tom Garrety tried to direct traffic. Marge issued bullhorn instructions that contradicted Tom’s.
And Jamie walked into the middle of all of it, laid a hand on the llama’s neck, said something nobody could hear, and led it back through the fence like the two of them had a standing appointment.
The crowd applauded. He looked like a man who wanted to issue everyone a refund.
By late afternoon Marge had run out of volunteers and patience in roughly equal amounts, and she aimed her bullhorn at the two of us and assigned us the cider booth in a tone that did not invite appeal.
“Cider booth needs hands,” she said. “You two have four between you. Math.”
And that is how I came to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Jamie Peterson behind a folding table, pouring cider for a town that had all decided to want cider at once, specifically now, specifically while watching us.
In the lulls he was easier to be near than I expected, maybe because pouring cider gave our hands something to do that wasn’t looking at each other.
We talked about nothing in particular: the festival, the bullhorn, the relative ugliness of the local dogs, a subject on which he had now, to his visible regret, become an authority.
He told me the llama was almost certainly the Pruitt boy’s, which everyone knew and nobody would say, because he had cried at the spring branding and the town had quietly agreed to protect his dignity forever.
I told him about the kittens. He informed me, without looking up from the cider, that if I adopted out even one more kitten than we had arrived with, he would be forced to ask questions.
I told him the math of kittens doesn’t answer questions.
He almost smiled at that, and I was starting to collect his almost-smiles the way you collect anything rare, carefully, and without admitting to a single soul that you have a collection.
“Asher’s a good kid,” he said in one of the lulls, watching my son across the square explain Bandit’s ribbon to a scarecrow. “He yours on your own, or is there a dad somewhere in the picture?”
He asked it lightly, like a man asking a thing he knows he is not owed. And I felt the old reflex kick in, the bright little deflection I keep loaded for exactly this.
“There’s a dad,” I said. “There’s not a picture.”
Then I waited, the way you wait after you have closed a door, to find out whether the other person is going to lean on it.
He didn’t. “Okay,” he said, and he meant it, and he poured the next cider, and he let the door stay shut.
I have spent a long time around a man who treated a closed door as a personal insult.
Brett couldn’t walk past a locked thing in me without trying the handle, softly, endlessly, until I opened it myself just to make the trying stop.
And here was this guarded, impossible man, who defends his own doors like a dragon over a hoard, handing me mine back the second I asked, without a fight.
It undid something in me. It wasn’t charm.
I have a hard-won immunity to charm. This was the opposite of charm.
This was a man telling me I didn’t owe him the room, and meaning it, and I had to study the cider very closely so that my face wouldn’t do anything I would have to answer for later.
And then the llama got loose again.
It came around the bandstand at a trot, a stolen ribbon streaming off one ear, with Tom Garrety in distant and doomed pursuit, and it ran a full lap of the square to a standing ovation before anybody laid a hand on it.
And somewhere in the middle of that, watching a grown sheriff lose a footrace to a llama in a stolen ribbon, Jamie laughed.
It wasn’t the almost-laugh I had watched him swallow before.
It was a real one. It came up out of him rough and startled, like it had cracked something loose on the way out.
He turned and looked at me while it was still happening, and I was already laughing too, and for about four seconds we just stood in it together, two people laughing at the same thing at the same time, which does not sound like much and is, I have come to understand, the entire foundation of everything.
It landed like a window thrown open in a house that had been shut up all summer.
The laugh wound down the way they do, into smaller smiles, into the quiet that comes after. The light was going amber and long across the square. There was a leaf in my hair. I didn’t know it. He did.
He reached over without deciding to, and I could see that he hadn’t decided to, and tucked the wet leaf out of my hair, his fingers grazing my temple for less than a second. It was half an inch of contact, nothing, the kind of thing you would do for anybody.
We both went completely still.
It wasn’t nothing, and we both knew it in the same instant, and we went still the way you go still when you realize the ground isn’t where you left it.
Then we stepped back. At the exact same second, mirror-perfect, like two people who had just laid a hand on a hot stove, we each pulled back half a step and found something urgent to do with the cider jugs.
For the rest of our shift we were models of professionalism.
We poured cider. We made change. We didn’t look at each other with a thoroughness that was its own kind of looking.
The space where his fingers had been kept its own small weather, and we both worked carefully around it the way you work around a wet-paint sign.
He said something about helping Tom mend the fence. I said something about getting Asher home before he filed for permanent custody of the bouncy castle. We were extremely normal at each other. We were so normal it was almost a confession.
But I walked my son home through the last of the day’s gold, with a tired dog and a ribbon the size of a dinner plate, and I finally understood the thing I had been outrunning since a rainy night in a ditch a month ago.
The wanting had never been the problem. I had handled wanting.
The problem was that it had stopped being only mine.
He had felt it too. I had watched it cross his face in the half inch of air where his fingers had just been.
And I knew, with the bottomless certainty you only ever get about a genuinely bad idea, that from here on the not-touching was going to be the hard part.