12. Elias
ELIAS
The Emberland Valley Summer Festival has operated on the third Saturday of August for as long as anyone in the county can remember, which in practical terms means since before anyone currently living was born.
It occupies four blocks of main street and the park behind the library, runs from ten in the morning until the fireworks at nine, and generates the kind of civic goodwill that local politicians reference in speeches for the remainder of the calendar year.
I know all of this the way I know most things about this town—from a distance, through the accounts of people who actually attend.
Commissioner Hayes calls on Wednesday to remind me that my presence has been requested three years running and declined three years running and that this year the festival committee has named Emberland Ranch a community partner in the preservation initiative, which means my attendance has moved from requested to something closer to expected.
He says it diplomatically because Hayes is a diplomatic man, but the message underneath the diplomacy is clear enough.
I tell him I'll consider it. By Thursday I've run out of legitimate reasons to say no, which is a different thing from wanting to go and should not be confused with it.
I tell Wyatt at the Friday morning meeting that I'll be at the festival Saturday.
He notes it on his clipboard without looking up and says, “I’ll let the committee know,” which makes it clear he’s already been talking to them—and likely to Hayes. I tuck that information away and leave it untouched, because calling it out would require admitting he’s right.
Lila is already in the truck when I come out Saturday morning, bag between her boots, a yellow dress I haven't seen before in place of her usual work clothes, her hair down instead of in the bun and catching the early light in a way I immediately stop looking at. She has a coffee thermos, and she offers it as soon as I get in, the gesture so automatic it’s clear she’s stopped treating it as a question. I find I’m perfectly fine with that.
"Hayes called you too?" I ask.
“Amelia called me. Apparently the festival has the best natural light of the summer and half the county shows up, so it’s a documentation opportunity.” She gives me a sideways glance. “Did Hayes guilt you, or did Wyatt do the actual work?”
"Both," I say, which makes her laugh, and I put the truck in drive before I can think too carefully about the dress or the hair or the easy way she laughs in my truck at seven-forty in the morning.
The festival is already in motion when we arrive, the main street blocked off and the booths open, the particular organized chaos of a community event that has been run long enough that everyone knows their role without being told.
I park two streets over and we walk in, and I'm immediately aware of something that I should have anticipated and didn't, which is that bringing Lila Anderson to a town event is less like attending with a colleague and more like arriving with a weather system.
It takes eleven minutes for her to become the center of it.
She shoots as she moves, which means she interacts with everyone she photographs, which means she's in conversation with the booth vendors and the festival volunteers and the children running between tables before we've covered half a block.
She doesn't perform friendliness—it's simply the natural consequence of paying full attention to whoever she's talking to, asking real questions, responding to answers with genuine follow-up rather than the social filler that passes for listening. Three different people stop me in the first hour to tell me she’s wonderful, which is something people say about someone they’ve known for a decade, not someone who arrived forty-five minutes ago.
I trail her at a distance that I tell myself is practical—she's working, she needs space to move—and watch the town receive her the way dry ground receives water. Effortlessly. As though the capacity was always there and the right element simply hadn't arrived yet.
Then Ruthie finds us.
She materializes between two booths with the kind of directional certainty that comes from already having the next ten minutes plotted out, fire-engine-red cardigan bright against the crowd and an expression that says she’s been waiting for this moment and intends to use it.
She takes my arm on one side and Lila’s on the other and steers us toward the garden society booth with a grip surprisingly firm for seventy-two.
"Elias Ember and his photographer," she announces to the three women staffing the booth, with an emphasis on the possessive that I notice and choose not to correct because correcting Ruthie Parker in public is an exercise with no successful outcome in the historical record.
"Lila's been documenting the ranch for six weeks now. Isn't that something?"
"It's a documentation contract," I say.
"Of course it is," Ruthie agrees, in the tone of someone agreeing with something they find entirely beside the point.
She introduces us to the garden society women, to the couple running the adjacent honey booth, to the festival committee chair who has wandered over, to a retired schoolteacher named Doris who apparently knew my mother and wants to tell Lila about it at length.
Through all of this, Ruthie keeps a hand on my arm with the grip of a woman making a point, and every introduction contains a phrasing that stops just short of explicit—they've been spending a lot of time at the ranch together, the photography is changing the whole place, doesn't Elias look well.
Lila catches my eye over Doris's shoulder and her expression contains an entire conversation—sympathy, amusement, and the barely-controlled look of someone working hard not to laugh.
The men start in the early afternoon.
Not aggressively, not unreasonably—the town is friendly, the festival is social, and Lila is an attractive woman with a camera and an easy laugh who has been talking to everyone she meets.
It's natural that the men of Emberland Valley would notice her.
I understand this intellectually. I understand it considerably less well in practice when a rancher named Cole Beaumont, who I have known for fifteen years and have never previously had any issue with, spends twenty minutes walking beside her between booths and laughing at things she says with a frequency that suggests he finds everything funny, which I know from fifteen years of acquaintance is not characteristic of Cole Beaumont.
Two other men ask if they can show her the area—the reservoir east of town, the outlook above the valley, places worth photographing.
She accepts the suggestions politely and says she'll add them to her list, which they interpret, correctly, as interest, and which I interpret, with a precision that surprises me with its intensity, as information I don't enjoy having.
I stay across the street and watch her work and feel something I haven't felt in long enough that it takes me several minutes to correctly identify it. When I do identify it, I find it both inconvenient and completely beyond my ability to dismiss.
Ruthie appears at my elbow. "You look like a man watching someone else touch something that belongs to him."
"She doesn't belong to me."
"No," Ruthie agrees pleasantly. "But you haven't figured out how to feel about that yet." She pats my arm. "I'll get you a coffee."
I’m still processing when I look back across the street and find a man I don’t know—mid-thirties, crowding her space, moving with the kind of assertiveness that assumes it will be welcomed—draping an arm around Lila’s shoulders to line them up in front of her camera.She’s setting the self-timer, and she doesn’t step back, but there’s a subtle shift in her shoulders that reads more like tolerance than comfort.
I cross the street before I’ve consciously decided to move.
"Lila." I arrive beside her and the man's arm is no longer around her because there is no longer room for it, my presence having reorganized the available space.
"Hayes is asking about the preservation partnership announcement. He wants a photograph with both of us for the committee record." The man’s neutral expression catches my focus—the one I use when civility is required toward someone I’ve already ruled out. “Excuse us.”
He excuses us. I put my hand at the small of Lila's back, which is a gesture that has both a practical explanation and approximately four other explanations I'm not going to examine in the middle of a street festival, and guide her toward the library end of the block where Hayes is, in fact, standing, which is the only element of what I just said that was accurate.
She waits until we're half a block away. "Hayes didn't ask for a photograph."
"Hayes asks for photographs constantly. It was a reasonable projection."
"You were jealous," she says, with the tone of someone identifying a bird species—straightforward, observational, completely unbothered.
"I was intervening in a situation that appeared to require it."
"He was harmless." She looks up at me with those dark eyes that I have learned see considerably more than they appear to from a distance. "You watched Cole Beaumont walk with me for twenty minutes and your expression looked like someone doing long division in their head."
"I wasn't?—"
"And when the man from the honey booth asked if he could show me the reservoir, you put your coffee down.
" She turns toward me with steady, deliberate attention, letting the truth of what she sees sit between us without embellishment.
"I'm not pointing this out to embarrass you.
I'm pointing it out because I found it interesting. "
"I'm sure you did," I say, which is not a substantive response and we both know it.
Hayes does, at this point, actually request a photograph, which restores a small amount of my dignity, and the afternoon moves toward evening without further incident of the kind I'm not examining.
We drive home as the festival moves into its dinner phase, the truck quiet in the particular way it is when a conversation has been had and its implications are still settling.
"For what it's worth," Lila says, as the ranch gate appears in the headlights, "I didn't want his arm around me."
I park the truck and she gets out, and I sit for a moment after she’s gone, her camera bag clipping the door frame on the way, and my gaze settles on the dark property beyond the windshield.
I spend the evening attempting to review the trust correspondence and reviewing, instead, the specific expression on Cole Beaumont's face when Lila said something that made him laugh.
I review the honey booth man's posture when he made his suggestion about the reservoir.
I review the arm around her shoulders and my own response to it, which arrived faster than thought and with more force than I was prepared for.
Somewhere around ten o'clock I accept the fact that I am sitting at my desk not doing work and go to bed instead, and the last clear thing I think before sleep is that I dislike, with a completeness that is both new and entirely without ambiguity, the idea of any man in Emberland Valley making Lila Anderson laugh in that unguarded, arriving-before-she-decides-to way, in any context that doesn't include me being present for it.
That's the thought I fall asleep on. I don't find it comfortable. I find it true.