Matt #3
Aunt Aggie intercepted me before I made it three steps toward the spigot.
My great-aunt is a small, sun-cured, entirely unsentimental woman who runs the Riverside Pines Campground, where Becca lives with Levi, with a firm hand and the town’s wagering with a firmer one, and she came at me through the crowd with her ledger under one arm and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, looking like a woman preparing to dispute a bill.
“You cost me four dollars, Matthew.”
“Hello, Aunt Aggie.”
“Four dollars. I had you to win. Not place—win.” She stopped in front of me and looked up at me, at the whipped cream, the pie on my collar, the grin I still hadn’t gotten back under control.
“And then you go soft in the back stretch, laughing like a loon while the fireman runs you down. Unserious. Undisciplined.” She sniffed.
“I want my money’s worth in the costume round. ”
There is no point apologizing to Aggie and no point defending yourself either, so I did what Becca and I learned to do a long time ago, which is stand there and let the weather pass. When we were kids, she made sure there was somewhere we could be that wasn’t home.
She was still looking at me. The dispute had gone out of her face, and something older and quieter had come up under it, and she reached out with one weathered thumb and swiped a smear of whipped cream off my jaw like I was nine years old.
“Look at you,” she said, half to herself. “Pie on your face in front of the whole town, grinning like a summer at the Pines.” She shook her head slowly. “I’ve been trying to lose four dollars on you for years, Matthew. Best money I ever spent. Proud of you, honey.”
And then, before it could become anything either of us would have to acknowledge, she flipped her glasses down out of her hair and onto her nose and was all business again.
“Costume round. I’m putting ten on you, so whatever that Starling girl has planned, commit to it.
Don’t embarrass me twice.” And she stomped off into the crowd to collect her debts, ledger out, glasses flashing, and I stood there with pie drying on my collar and understood that I had just been told, in fluent Aggie, that she loved me and was proud of me and had been waiting years to watch me be happy.
Four dollars. Cheap at the price.
I cleaned up at the spigot by the stand, cold water and a borrowed towel, and I was wiping the last of the whipped cream out of my eyebrows when Elizabeth found me, still bright with it, still half laughing, the clipboard for once nowhere in sight.
“Officer Hartford,” she said. “I have to be honest. I had you pegged for a man who’d eat a pie like he was filling out a report.”
“That was the plan.”
“What happened to the plan?”
I looked at her. The whole bright morning was behind her, the maples and the smoke and the crowd breaking up into clumps of neighbors, the festival she’d built turning all around us, and she was looking up at me flushed and grinning and close, and I thought about telling her the truth, which was you happened to the plan, which was you dared me and I have apparently spent my whole life waiting for somebody to dare me, which was a great deal more than a man says at a spigot with pie in his eyebrows.
“Lost track of it,” I said instead, which was its own kind of true.
Something flickered across her face, quick and warm, there and filed away, and I recognized the move because I’d taught it to myself years ago—catch the real thing, put it somewhere safe, hand back something lighter.
“Well,” she said. “Second place. Don’t let it go to your head.
You’ve still got the costume round, and I’ve seen what this town does to a man in a costume. ”
“You going to tell me what the costume is?”
“Absolutely not. The dread is part of the process.”
All I could do was laugh in response.
She started to turn, then stopped. Something had caught her eye, and instead of leaving she stepped back in close, close enough that I could smell the cold and the cider on her, and reached up.
Her thumb brushed my brow, just above one eyebrow, smoothing away a smear of whipped cream the borrowed towel had missed.
A small, easy, thoughtless touch. It went through me like a current.
“Missed a bit,” she said.
And I stood absolutely still under it, because I did not trust myself to do anything else.
Her hand was warm, gone as quick as it came, and she looked up at me from that close for one more second, and the grin softened by one degree, just for me.
“Hey. That was a good laugh, Matt. You should do that more.” And then, before I could do anything with it, she was gone, back into the crowd, leaving me at the spigot with cold water on my hands and my heart doing something it had no business doing over a woman wiping cream off my face, and the strangest feeling in my chest, light and unfamiliar and faintly terrifying, which I eventually identified, driving home with pie on my collar and my face aching from a morning of being used for its actual purpose, as happiness.