Matt #2
They sat us at a long table behind six pumpkin pies.
Dale to my left, already sweating. Brody Cassidy beside him, one of the Cassidy boys off the family garage out on the county road, sleeves shoved up off forearms a life under cars had built, dark hair and an easy white grin and the kind of unbothered good looks that made half the lawn forget they’d come for the pie—he caught me looking and gave me a nod, friendly, no edge to it, a man who’d been roped into this by his brothers and decided to enjoy himself anyway.
Past him, Tristan, who owned the hardware store and had said maybe four words since we’d been seated, sat regarding his pie with the still, unreadable focus of a man planning something the rest of us hadn’t been told about, and I made a note, out of old cop habit, that I’d want to know more about that one eventually.
Simon Holloway on his other side had already inspected his pie, found it acceptable, and folded his hands like a man who intended to win cleanly and then critique the recipe—Simon ran the kitchen at Holloway’s and brought the same exacting calm to a pie-eating contest that he brought to a dinner rush.
Jude on the end, peeling off his tracksuit jacket like a man entering a boxing ring, rolling his neck.
And me, in the middle, with a pie in front of me with a whipped-cream topping that I understood was going to be the end of my dignity.
And money was changing hands. That was the part I hadn’t expected.
All across the lawn, quietly and not so quietly, Sweetbriar was betting on us, and every dollar of it ran through one folding chair at the corner of the hosts’ table, where my great-aunt Aggie had a whole ledger going, taking the knitting circle’s book on the entire contest while pretending to admire the centerpiece.
I heard my own name in the low churn of it more than once—the cop, put me down for the cop, he looks hungry, no, the firefighter’s been training, did you see him lunging—and watched a steady, discreet procession of townsfolk drift past Aggie’s chair, murmur a name and a number, and drift off again richer in anticipation if nothing else.
In the front row, under three quilts in a lawn chair that had been carried out and positioned by what looked like the entire combined effort of her daughters, Iris Starling presided.
She’d been sprung from the Big House for the morning under a treaty I could only imagine the terms of, and she sat there small and sharp-eyed, a general reviewing troops she found mostly disappointing.
When she caught me looking, she did not smile.
She inclined her head, once, the barest fraction, the way you’d acknowledge a soldier you’d personally drafted and intended to keep. I inclined mine back.
A few rows back, Gwen stood with her three kids and a cup of cider in her hand, and she was watching the contestant table—or really just one man at the end of it.
I followed her line of sight the way you can’t help doing once the job’s in your blood, and it ran straight to Brody Cassidy, and when he glanced up from his pie and found her in the crowd, something passed between them, quick and bright and instantly tucked away, and Gwen looked down at her cider like it had asked her a question.
My plan was to win efficiently and feel nothing.
I had decided that if I had to be dragged into this, I would treat it like a tactical problem—optimal bite size, minimal motion, no wasted effort—and I would win, because I do not enter things to lose, and I would do it with my dignity bolted down tight, and then it would be over.
Elizabeth caught my eye from the steps just before she started us. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, and tipped her head a fraction, and there was a dare in it, and under the dare something gentler, something like come on, let go, just this once, I dare you.
“Contestants ready,” Elizabeth called. “On your marks. Get set—”
I abandoned the plan.
I don’t entirely know why. I’d like to say it was strategy, but it was the exact opposite of strategy.
The horn went, and three hundred people roared, and I put my face in a pumpkin pie in front of the entire town of Sweetbriar, and somewhere around the third enormous graceless mouthful, whipped cream up both eyebrows and filling on my chin and absolutely no dignity remaining anywhere in the county, something came loose in my chest that I think had been bolted down since I was about fourteen years old.
I lost. I lost badly. I lost to Jude Barrett, who inhaled that pie like a man possessed, like four potatoes’ worth of preparation a night was a legit strategy, and came up roaring with his arms over his head and filling in his beard while Harper screamed something at him that was either congratulations or a threat.
But I came up second, and I came up laughing—really laughing, the kind that takes your whole body, the kind I could not have produced on command if you’d paid me, the kind I hadn’t done in so long that the muscles for it felt borrowed.
I had spent my life being the one who watched.
The one at the edge with his back to the wall and his eye on the door, who made sure everyone else got to have the party, who held the perimeter so the people he loved could be careless inside it.
I had never once been inside it myself. And I had told myself for so long that this was who I was—the watcher, the holder, the man at the edge—that I’d forgotten it had ever been a choice.
And then a woman in a knit cap had tipped her head at me and dared me to put my face in a pie, and I’d done it, and the perimeter had held without me for one single morning, and the sky had not fallen, and people had laughed with me instead of safely behind the wall I stood at.
I was inside it. For the first time I could remember, I was inside the party instead of guarding it, and what I felt, under the pie and the noise, was so large and so simple that it embarrassed me.
I sat there covered in pie, laughing, and across the lawn I caught Becca on her feet with both hands over her mouth and her eyes shining, and Levi beside her grinning like he’d won something, and Harper howling, and Jude offering me a hand up like we were brothers-in-arms instead of rivals, which I took, because I was apparently a person who took offered hands now.
And Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was doubled over the hosts’ table, laughing so hard she’d lost the megaphone, one hand flat on the table holding herself up, and when she came up for air she found me across all that noise and that wreckage of pie, and for one second the festival fell away and it was just the two of us looking at each other across a laughing crowd, her face open and bright and undefended, mine probably ridiculous, and she mouthed three words at me.
You let go.
I had. She’d seen it. She’d dared me to, and I’d done it, and she’d caught me doing it, and instead of feeling cornered I felt—seen, in a way that didn’t sting, which was so unfamiliar I didn’t have a file for it at all.
Donna came around with a roll of paper towels and a look of deep maternal satisfaction.
June held her phone up and read the verdict off.
“Jude Barrett, and it’s not close; the meter almost cracked.
The cheer that went up for him was loud enough to start a small avalanche somewhere on the mountain.
Iris, as the nearest thing the table had to an authority, banged her quilt-wrapped hand on the arm of her chair and ratified the phone’s verdict in a voice that brooked no appeal, then pointed a regal finger at me and added, “Second place ate that pie like he meant it.”
And the crowd cheered that too. Cheered second place.
Cheered a cop with whipped cream in his eyebrows and pie on his collar, a warm rolling swell of it that had no business being that loud for a man who’d lost, and as the crowd started breaking up, people kept finding me—a hand on my shoulder, a nod across the hay bales, an old-timer I’d once helped dig out of a snowed-in driveway gripping my arm on his way past and saying “Good to see, son. Good to see,” without ever specifying what was, exactly, good to see.