Elizabeth
Days after the festival opened, with the rain settled in soft over the farm and the early dark already down, my mother put a second pot of coffee on at eight o’clock at night, which in our house has never once been about coffee.
“A second pot,” I said. “Bold.”
“It’s decaf.”
“It is not decaf. I watched you take the red bag out of the freezer. The red bag is for emergencies and Christmas morning.”
“Fine, it’s not decaf.” She set two mugs on the table, hip-checked the drawer shut, and sat down across from me with the whole rainy evening in front of us like it was something she’d ordered special. “I like the rain. I want to be awake for it.”
“You want to be awake,” I repeated. “For the rain.”
“It’s a good rain.”
“You think all rain has a personality.”
“All rain does have a personality. This is a nice slow one. It’s the golden retriever of rain.
” She pushed the sugar at me before I asked, and sipped her coffee, eyes bright over the rim, and I knew the look, and I knew what was coming, and I drank my coffee and let it come anyway.
“Donna tells me Officer Hartford’s been coming through the Stop she knew I was worried.
Mothers are the original detectives. She just didn’t have the proof yet, and I intended to make sure she never got it, because the second Heather Starling had proof of how frightened I actually was, she’d climb back out of that bed, headache and all, and try to add my half to her load.
Mom and I split everything down the middle, since I moved back in: the bills, the chores, all of it.
What I would never once hand her was the fear.
Handing my mother my fear has only ever meant watching her pick it up and add it to everything else she hauls, and I was not about to do that to her. She had enough to deal with.
So I let her rest. And I went back down to the quiet kitchen.
I pulled the festival ledger out from under the seed catalogs where I keep it, and I spread the projections under the lamp with the wood stove ticking and the rain going steady on the roof, and somewhere in the next hour, the fear I’d been outrunning since the hospital finally caught up and sat down across from me in my mother’s empty chair.
I am good at the festival. I can run a corn maze and a pie round and five grown men through a pageant none of them wanted to be in, and I can move busloads of strangers through a pumpkin patch and make every last one of them feel like the season was thrown personally for them.
What I am not, it turns out, is good enough at math to make the festival projections into a number that matters.
I ran it three ways. Best case—perfect weather every weekend, a record gate, the contest fundraiser coming in strong, the stand selling out of everything—we got close.
Close. A long reach short of the loan, and that was the version where nothing went wrong, where it didn’t rain us out, where Grandma’s medical bills—which I had also found—politely waited their turn.
Somewhere around the second column my heart had started up, a low hard knocking against my ribs I could feel in my throat.
The realistic version didn’t get close. The realistic version was a shortfall I sat and stared at until the digits stopped meaning anything, and my stomach pulled itself into a fist, and my breath went short and high in my chest, in and out too fast to do me any good.
I put my pen down very carefully, as if it might go off like a bomb, and I did not make a joke, because there was no one there to make it to, and that’s the only time the jokes ever really stop.
Out the dark window the tarp on the barn lifted and settled at its loose corner, pale in the yard light, and I thought about the roof we still hadn’t bought, and the equipment loan behind since spring, and the bank’s word—remedies—and the festival we staked this whole farm on, riding on a month of weekends in Oregon weather.
And it kept climbing, the thing in my chest, a hot pressure building up behind my breastbone and rising, and the sting came up sudden and fierce behind my nose, that first burning warning before the eyes go.