Elizabeth
The rain had finally come in for real, the soft relentless Oregon kind that doesn’t fall so much as take up residence, and the Stop she’s a menace,” I said.
Harper said, “thank you”, and Bella nodded slowly, filing this away in the vast and terrifying archive of things small children remember and repeat at the worst possible moment.
Becca was on register, with that high steady brightness she’d been wearing since the wedding, the brightness of a person whose own life had finally fixed itself and now had spare wattage to aim at everyone else’s.
She was aiming it at me this morning. I could feel it on the side of my face like sun through a window.
“So,” Becca said, ringing up Simon Holloway’s protein bar with one eye on me. “How’s it going with the contestant?”
“Which one. I have six. Dale brought a fog machine to the orientation meeting last night and tried to make an entrance. I had to confiscate it. I’m running a daycare for grown men.”
“You know which one.”
“I do not know which one.”
Harper, who misses nothing and has been weaponizing it since the third grade, set her coffee down. “Wait. Which one?”
“There is no which one,” I said, with the calm of a woman lying to two people she grew up with.
Becca and Harper looked at each other. It was a brief look, a couple of decades deep, the look of two best friends confirming a reading without a word passing, and I have given that exact look myself a thousand times, and I knew precisely how thoroughly I was cooked.
“Matt patched her barn roof,” Becca told Harper, conversational, examining Simon’s change like it was interesting.
“He did not.”
“Three hours. Sunday. With Jonas.”
“On his day off?” Harper’s whole face had gone alight, the gossip-as-civic-service glow, the look she gets when the town is about to be informed whether or not the town asked.
“Officer Hartford spent his day off on a roof. For a farm. That isn’t even—” She turned to me, delighted, merciless.
“Elizabeth. Honey. That man does not do anything that isn’t on a list. He has never once in his life been spontaneous.
Levi says he plans his spontaneity. And he spent Sunday on your roof. ”
“It was a community matter,” I said. “The roof shelters feed. The feed sustains the animals. The animals are part of the festival ecosystem, which raises money for—”
“Oh my god, she’s doing the ecosystem thing,” Becca said.
“—the public good,” I finished, with dignity.
The bell over the door went, and a bunch of dripping teenagers came in for energy drinks, and I was saved, briefly, by commerce—woohoo capitalism.
I rang them up. I refilled the coffee. And the whole time, in the back of my skull behind the eleven tabs, a twelfth one had quietly opened, and it was a window with Matt Hartford in it, on a roof, in the rain that hadn’t come yet, doing something that was not on any list, for me, and I could not get it to close.
That was the trouble with him. Everybody else in my life, I knew their order.
I could pour their coffee before they asked, and that was the whole transaction.
I knew Simon’s protein bar, Harper’s no-foam, Bella’s cocoa, and the high-schoolers’ terrible neon drinks.
I had spent my entire life learning everyone’s order so that I would always know what to give them and never have to be asked what I needed back.
I did not know Matt Hartford’s order; that was the thing.
I mean, I knew his coffee. Large, black, no discussion.
But I didn’t know what the man actually wanted, and worse, much worse, I’d asked him once, on a dance floor, and watched him not have an answer, and ever since then I’d had the unsettling sense that we were two people who’d spent our whole lives memorizing everyone else’s order specifically so nobody would ever get around to taking ours.
“You went somewhere in your brain,” Harper observed.
“I’m tired.”
“You went somewhere with a view.”
“Harper.”
“I’m just saying.” She gathered Bella, who had completed her honey-jar formation and stood back to admire it.
Harper kissed my cheek. “He’s a good one.
The good ones are quiet. That’s the whole problem with them, you have to actually pay attention.
” And she swept Bella out into the rain before I could find the joke that would have closed the door, which was unlike me, and which I blamed on the four hours of sleep and not on the accuracy.
Becca stayed. Becca, I was learning, was a stayer—she had the patience her brother had, the willingness to just be in a room with you until the truth got bored of hiding.
She wiped down the counter I’d already wiped and let the quiet sit, and then, not looking at me, in a voice with none of the teasing left in it, she said, “He’s different lately. Matt. Since the wedding.”
I didn’t say anything. The rain ran down the front windows.
“He’s been alone a long time,” Becca said.
“Longer than anyone knows. He raised me, mostly. Our parents were—” she stopped, recalibrated, gave me the clean version “—they were elsewhere. So it was Matt. He was the one who showed up. Every time, for everything, my whole life. He notices people. It’s the cop thing, but it’s not only the cop thing.
He notices what people need, and he gets it to them before they ask.
And the thing about a man like that, Elizabeth—” and here she smiled, sad and fond and entirely too knowing “—is that the only way to ever do something for him back is to notice him first. Before he hides it. You’re good at that too. ”
“I notice everybody’s order,” I said. It came out smaller than I meant it to.
“I know,” Becca said gently. “That’s what I mean. You and my brother are exactly the same kind of broken, and I say that with love. I’m going to go restock the Doritos so you can go back into denial.”
And she did; she actually went and restocked the entire chip aisle, leaving me alone at the register with the rain, and the smell of green chili and the new twelfth tab now open in my brain, Matt Hartford on a roof, and the awful dawning understanding that the sister he’d spent his whole life protecting had just handed me the manual for protecting him back.
Grandma was right about the bees, too, was the thing I kept circling back to. Take somebody with you. It’s not a one-person job. She hadn’t been talking about the bees. She’d been giving me life rules. That Iris Starling was a sage, dang it. Life—was not a one-person job.
I closed my eyes for one second, and let myself feel exactly how tired I was, how scared about the farm’s debt, how much I did not want to do any of this alone, the whole banked weight of it that I never let anybody see and was apparently exactly as bad at hiding as Matt was.
I texted Matt on my break, deciding to kill two birds with one stone.
Me: The corn maze opens soon. Want to meet me for a trial run? Lights and layout test. We can talk about your pie-eating strategy. You in?
Strictly festival business.
He wrote back inside a minute.
Matt: In. What do you need me to bring?
What do you need? Not what time, not how long. What do you need me to bring? I sat in the stockroom on an upturned milk crate and looked at those four words for longer than four words deserve, and then I wrote back.
Me: Just yourself.
I immediately wanted to throw my phone, and didn’t, because I needed it for the eleven other tabs.
The man had a tell, and the tell was showing up. And I was starting to have one back, and I was afraid mine was letting him show up for me.
I got my proof of both, after dark, in the middle of the corn maze.
The rain quit, leaving the whole farm dripping and the sky scrubbed to a deep bruised blue with the first stars coming out hard over the ridge.
Cold enough that my breath ghosted in the lights.
The maze stood eight feet tall and soaking, the corn gone dry and papery at the tops where it rattled in the smallest wind, the whole thing smelling of wet earth and crushed stalks and the green ghost of summer giving up.