Chapter 14
Teddy
The morning of the cheese festival arrived, muggy and bright.
The event poster had said “rain or shine,” and right now, the weather was “sweaty upper lip, and enough humidity to forget about the risk of sunburn until it’s too late.
” I’d loaded the van with mead, honey, Chloe’s event flyers, and the same canvas tablecloth we’d used for every market and festival since we’d started trading fourteen years ago.
It would see more action this summer than it had in the past, and even more next year if I had anything to say about it.
I’d already started lining up slots for more than a year out, combatting my unease about the summer ending by planning for my return.
It was exhausting, juggling all those timelines, but it would be worth it.
Chloe and I had two different bickering matches by the time we finished setting up.
One was about how to arrange the mead – I had a tried-and-true layout, but she thought it “lacked dimension” – and the other was whether the bunting Jen had sent with us was cute and photogenic – Chloe’s opinion – or a violation of basic taste, as I thought.
We split the difference and left the decorations in the van, then started arranging the mead on upturned wooden crates like Chloe wanted.
She looked pleased enough with the setup, snapping picture after picture as I turned each bottle of mead so the label faced the right way.
But by half past ten, though the marquee was packed non-existent-wall-to-non-existent-wall with people, none of them were stopping at our table.
They’d sweep past, eyes scanning the offerings, maybe sparing a passing smile for us as we waited expectantly, but then they’d get distracted by the cheese samples at the next stall down or the cider in the next row over.
Our mistake? We hadn’t brought anything to let them try.
We had bottles and jars, and that was it.
Chloe was trying her best, but I could tell she was getting antsy.
She perched on the cooler where our lunch was stashed, foot bouncing, tapping on her phone between attempted eye contact with passers-by, muttering about how all this would make for a “hideously uneventful” time lapse.
Every so often, she’d look at me like she wanted to offer an idea but had remembered I’d rejected her last five and didn’t want to risk the next one.
I hated the tension, but I didn’t know how to relieve it, so I just started polishing our stock, one jar or bottle at a time, until the labels practically glowed.
At quarter past eleven, Chloe finally broke the standoff. “Should we think about starting to discount?”
I bristled. “If we start slashing prices now, it just looks desperate. Nobody buys early in the day, anyway, or they have to carry it around. And, plus, nobody wants eight per cent alcohol at noon. They want cheese.”
She nodded, lips pressed together. “Right, but what if nobody buys at all? Because I see a lot of bags in hands.”
I scanned the crowd, noting the long queue in front of the bakery stand and the guy with the giant wheel of “cheese fudge”.
“People are buying,” I agreed, admitting defeat. “Just not from us.”
“Maybe if we—” Chloe finally started, but she stopped herself.
I didn’t want her to – she was right that we needed to do something.
I wanted her to fight me so we could find some sort of solution.
But even I knew that I’d shut her down too many times to expect her to do that without giving her any indication that I was willing to play ball.
“What are your other ideas?” I asked, glancing at her phone. “I’ve seen you on that thing all morning. Don’t pretend like you haven’t been strategising.”
Chloe eyed me for a moment, sussing out whether I meant it, then must have decided I did, because she smiled and rummaged through her bag, pulling out a small pouch of something that clattered when she shook it.
“Dice?” I asked, annoyed that I so readily recognised the sound. “How the hell are dice going to solve this problem?”
Chloe rolled her eyes and reached behind her for the cardboard box we’d packed our decorations in. “We can use them to lure people in,” she said. “Basic consumer psychology.”
I decided to humour her, passing her a Sharpie from the supply kit when she asked for it.
She carefully wrote something on the cardboard, then tried to prop it up against the box on the table.
It wouldn’t stay at first, but then she reached up to her head, where she’d been sporting two delicate braids wrapping from her temples to where they met in the back, and produced two bobby pins, using them to attach the makeshift sign to one plank of the crate.
“Voila!” she said, standing up and gesturing triumphantly to it. I came around to the front to read it.
ROLL FOR MEAD
Free dice roll with any purchase! +1 to your roll for every product you’ve already bought.
Natural 20 – Free Gwenynen bundle!
16–20 – 30% off one item
11–15 – 20% off one item
6–10 – 10% off one item
2–5 – 5% off one item
Natural 1 – womp, womp…
“What might that be?” I asked, pointing at “Free Gwenynen bundle”. Chloe smiled sheepishly and pushed forward a jar of honey and a bottle of mead.
“No way,” I said. “It’s too much.”
“They only have a five per cent chance of rolling that,” she said, “and we’ve sold approximately nothing. Plus, people can only roll after they make a purchase.”
I had to admit that did help, but it didn’t solve our main problem. “And, remind me, how are we getting people to purchase to begin with?”
Chloe jabbed the Sharpie in the air in a kind of “eureka!” motion. Then she reached into the cash box, took two ten-pound notes, and disappeared from behind the table.
“Seriously?” I called after her. “Robbing me is your solution?”
But I watched as she approached a chutney and jams vendor, sweet-talked him for a moment in a way that would have read as flirty if I hadn’t known she was gay, and then accepted something from him, though I couldn’t see what.
She strutted back over to our table – and, yes, strutting was the only word to describe the cocky sashay she did as she returned – and smacked three sleeves of sample cups onto the table.
“There’s more where that came from,” she said, then tucked a ten pound note into my front pocket, her touch leaving a hot sear behind. “And I didn’t even need all the cash.”
* * *
I hated to admit it, but Chloe had been right.
Once we opened a bottle and started handing out samples, we started moving mead faster than I’d ever seen.
We still weren’t doing honey samples, but people bought jars once they’d tasted the mead, or they rolled a discount, which compelled them to splash out a bit more. It was genius.
Actually, I loved to admit it. Because, as much as I wished it had been my idea, I was just relieved we didn’t need to slash all of our prices to move the stock.
I reminded myself that Chloe succeeding was a good thing – sure, the budget for my salary had been used to hire her, but if she actually managed to help grow the farm, that would all come back, right?
We did start to get very toasty behind the table from the afternoon sun filtering through the marquee, the humidity gathering beneath it, and the fact that we were now moving around like madmen trying to speak and sell to everyone who stopped by.
The festivalgoers created a wall of heat and sound just beyond the table.
Kids with ice cream-covered mouths smeared them on the tablecloth.
Old men in flat caps sampled every booth in a straight line, and the line at our stall got so thick at one point that I had to shout the mead descriptions to people standing three rows back.
I wiped down the dice obsessively, cringing as they got sticky from grubby kid hands – and equally grubby adult hands.
In a rare lull at the beginning of a new music set, we stopped and looked at one another, and I took in how Chloe’s red face and heavy breathing matched my own.
“The dice were a great idea,” she said, unsticking a strand of hair from her forehead, “but I miss my pins. I need to put this up.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, holding my hair up to expose my neck to a breeze that didn’t come. “It’s sweltering.”
“Here,” Chloe said, motioning for me to turn around. “Let me.”
“I don’t have a hair tie,” I admitted. “Remind me to add that to the supply list for the next event though.”
“You don’t need one,” she said. “Your hair looks thick enough.”
I looked sidelong at her. “Huh?”
“Here, I’ll show you,” she said, signalling again for me to spin around. I complied this time, letting her take my hair from me and start to braid.
Chloe was gentle, pulling out the tangles with little half-tugs, not the rough, impatient rips I gave myself.
I felt her split the hair into three, and her knuckles brushed the base of my neck every time she looped the hair over.
I stared ahead, trying to focus on the stock, but all my attention was zeroed in on her touch: the light scrape of her skin on mine, the warmth of her body behind me, the way her breath made the fine hairs at my nape stand up…
“If you don’t separate the bottom as you braid,” she explained in a low, soft voice, surprisingly close to my ear, “it’ll braid itself from the bottom up. And when you meet in the middle, you just flip it through, and it’ll stay.”
“Wow,” I said dumbly. Then she finished, and I felt the absence of her touch immediately, lurching forward as if I’d been leaning into it. I spun around to face her to find a soft smile on her rosy lips, the flush of her cheeks having spread to her neck.
“You’re good at that,” I said, a little hoarse all of a sudden. Maybe it was from flogging our wares so intently.
“I’m the designated hair braider of the friend group for Ren Faires and the like,” she said. “Now do me?”