Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The meadow was something else. It made Eliot question the budget and the talent pool of this supposedly small town.
He'd seen the setup going in — the blankets, the vendor row, the fairy lights waiting for evening — but seeing it populated was different.
The hill was covered now, checkered blankets filled with people who had brought thermoses and the willingness to spend an afternoon looking at the sky together.
Children ran between the stalls. Someone had brought a dog wearing a bandana printed with clouds.
Betty Ann was holding court near her shortbread table with the serene authority of a woman in her element.
Eliot stood at the broadcast stage and looked at all of it.
He stood apart, but somehow felt included.
People nodded at him, thanked him for his predictions, made not-so-subtle inquiries about his intentions with Dalene.
Eliot was shook hands, was gracious when appropriate, and dodged left when personal questions were aimed at him.
He was dodging right when Earl Mackie found him. The elderly man came through the crowd with the unhurried stride and extended his hand. Eliot shook it.
"How was the yield?"
"Best second cut I've had in six years," he said. "Got it all off Thursday evening, just like you said. System came through Friday morning, earlier than anyone was calling it, and everything was already in. If I'd waited on the regional forecast, I'd have lost half of it."
Eliot opened his mouth to be gracious, but Earl wasn't done.
"That's my winter operating budget. That's my grandson's college fund getting a deposit instead of a withdrawal."
Something moved through Eliot's chest. The feeling of having done a thing that reached further than you'd seen when you were doing it. "I'm glad it helped."
"You helped." Earl walked away before Eliot could respond.
Which was fortunate. Because Eliot was not entirely sure what to say to that. He stood in the middle of the festival meadow and looked at the mountains and thought about thousands of viewers in Philly who had never once told him his forecast had mattered to their family's future.
Two more farmers found him before Miles had finished setting up the shot.
A woman who ran a berry operation out on Route 12.
She'd caught his Tuesday broadcast and moved her irrigation schedule and the timing had been exactly right.
A man from the orchard on the eastern slope who said the extended forecast had helped him plan his picking crew three days out.
He saw Dalene before he looked for her. She simply appeared in his field of vision.
She was at the edge of the blanket display with Mrs. Patel and the woman he knew was Mrs. Chen.
The three of them stood back, watching the hill fill up with the quiet satisfaction.
Dalene had her hair down and was wearing a yellow dress.
She looked like pure sunshine. Eliot was drawn to her, but he heard his name being called.
He turned to Miles who pointed at the red light on the camera.
"Good afternoon from the Heart Shaped Clouds Festival in Valor, Montana.
Sixty-three years. That's how long this town has been coming out here to look up.
I've been a meteorologist for twelve years and I can tell you what's happening in that sky right now down to the millibar — the pressure, the humidity, the temperature differential, the moisture content of the air mass moving through.
What I can tell you as a scientist is that the atmospheric conditions today are producing something rare.
Cumulus formations at mid-level with a specific set of variables that, according to sixty years of documented records kept by a science teacher named Vivienne Austen, tend to produce something you don't see very often. "
Above the hill, moving in from the southwest on the light variable winds exactly where he'd said they'd be, a cumulus formation was doing something that couldn't be entirely quantified.
Across the meadow, heads tilted back. Hands raised to point. The formation was unmistakable.
Two rounded lobes, symmetrical, tapering to a clean point at the base. Moving slowly across the afternoon sky. A heart.
A clear, actual, documented, atmospherically produced heart-shaped cloud, moving over Valor, Montana on a Saturday afternoon in late summer.
"Three months ago," Eliot said to the camera, "I told a national audience that cloud-watching was a waste of time.
I was wrong about that. I was wrong about a lot of things.
The science is real. The data is real. The atmospheric conditions that produce formations like the one above us right now are measurable and documentable and entirely explainable.
And they're also magical. Both things are true.
I'm Eliot Brooks. Be sure and look up today. "
He held the shot.
Miles lowered the camera.
The meadow erupted.
All he heard was Dalene's smile. He swore it made a sound, like the tinkling of the first drops of rain on a sunny day. The yellow dress. The freckles. The unguarded expression, and underneath it something that was open and warm and entirely directed at him.
Eliot stepped off the stage. Unfortunately, there were obstacles in his path to getting to the woman he wanted. Gemma Lark was at the edge of the crowd with her notebook open and her pen moving. She looked up and caught his eye and smiled, and kept writing.
One obstacle down, but there were more in his path.
Tristan stood alone near the tree line, twenty feet from where Brooke had been an hour ago and wasn't anymore.
He was looking at Dalene with the expression of a man understanding, too late and too completely, the full cost of a decision he'd made while watching a movie about someone else's love story.
Tristan didn't make a move on Dalene. Looks like the Letterman was smarter than Eliot gave him credit for. But there was still the crowd of townsfolk.
All of Valor, on their blankets and at their stalls and gathered at the edges of the meadow, watched him cross towards Dalene with the collective held breath.
He saw Miles, camera raised.
He felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Once. Twice. Veronica, almost certainly.
Every single one of those things was a reason to slow down. To remember the terms of an arrangement that had an expiration date and a clean stop and no complications.
Eliot crossed the meadow. People parted. He was barely aware of them. He was aware of the heart-shaped cloud still moving overhead and the cider smell and the wood smoke and the fairy lights beginning to matter as the afternoon softened. He was aware of her, and the rest of it was context.
He stopped in front of Dalene, who hadn't moved since he'd spotted her back from the stage. He leaned down. Close enough that his mouth was near her ear. Close enough to smell the lavender. Close enough that what he said next was between them even if the whole meadow was watching.
"Is it alright," he said quietly, "if I kiss you?"
Dalene pulled back just enough to look at him. "For the crowd?"
"For the crowd," he lied. Because the truth was, he just wanted to kiss her.
Her eyes moved across his face the way they did when she was deciding something. He held still and let her decide.
She nodded.
He kissed her.
And the moment his lips touched hers he understood with complete, inconvenient clarity that this was the solution to his sleepless nights.
Because his body unclenched from the fist it had been in since he was a child.
He relaxed into the kiss, pulled Dalene closer, and decided he was not letting go.