14. Matt #2
I don’t know what I expected. Polite laughter, maybe.
What I got was the sound a few hundred people make when a large, visibly serious man—a man this town had mostly only ever seen behind a badge, handing out parking tickets and standing grim at the edge of their parties and parades—steps into the lantern light wearing a cooking pot as a hat with absolute, funereal commitment and does not crack a smile.
There was a beat of silence.
And then the lawn came apart. Kids shrieked.
Somebody’s grandfather laughed so hard he set off a coughing fit and had to be thumped on the back.
And at the judges’ table, Elizabeth put down her microphone, covered her face with both hands, and laughed until she had to sit down, the real one, the laugh that bent her in half, the laugh I’d have worn that pot a week to earn.
I did not smile. That was the whole bit, and some animal instinct I didn’t know I had told me not to break it. I stood there as Johnny Appleseed, grave as a man at a graveside, and let them have it, and adjusted the pot a half-inch with great dignity, which finished Elizabeth off entirely.
June held her phone up over her head and read the crowd the only way that counted.
She’d gone down the line all night, holding that meter up for each of us, calling the numbers out to the lawn and to the livestream both—and when she got to me, to the pot, the needle on her little screen did something it apparently had not done all evening, because she just stared at it for a second and then turned the phone around to show the front row like she couldn’t be blamed for what science had found.
“That’s the number,” she said. “That’s the highest number. I don’t make the rules. The pot wins.”
Rosemary Barrett, who had spent the entire round loudly campaigning for her grandsons, looked at that phone as if it had insulted her personally and demanded a recount.
There was no recount. There was only June, shrugging, gleeful, and a lawn that had already made up its mind a full minute before the meter agreed with it.
The place erupted.
I wish I took it with composure. I didn’t.
The noise hit me—a few hundred of my neighbors on their feet hollering my name, the same neighbors I’d spent a career keeping a careful professional distance from—and something in me that had been clenched shut for years simply let go.
I felt the grin break across my face before I’d decided to allow it, the first one all night, and the lawn somehow got louder, because, apparently, there is nothing a small town loves more than watching its grimmest man finally crack a smile.
Elizabeth came across the grass with the ribbon.
It was a big cheap rosette, gold satin with a fan of ribbon tails, BEST COSTUME stamped across the middle in the same hand as the banner, the kind of thing you’d pin on a prize hog at a county fair.
She was trying very hard to look official about it and failing, the grin still pulling at her, her eyes bright.
She stopped in front of me, close, and held it up, and frowned at the geometry of the problem.
“I have to pin this to you,” she said, “and you’re wearing a pot.”
“The pot is a documented hazard,” I agreed.
“Hold still.”
And she reached up with both hands and lifted the cast-iron pot off my head, careful, like she was uncrowning me, and the whole lawn went ohhhh in anticipation.
From somewhere in the front rows Iris Starling’s voice rang out, sharp and clear as a struck bell, “That’s my pot, Elizabeth Anne, you bring that back to my kitchen tonight, or there’ll be words,” which got its own laugh.
Elizabeth called back “Yes, Grandma” without breaking stride and handed the pot off down the line toward the Big House like a bucket in a fire brigade.
Then she turned back to me with the ribbon and the pin, and bent her head to my chest to fix it to the front of my costume, close enough that I could smell cider and cold air in her hair, her fingers working the clasp through the burlap with a concentration that had gone a half-second too careful—and her knuckles brushed my chest and stilled there, and she looked up, and my hands came up without instruction to steady her by the waist, and for one second we were standing chest to chest in front of the entire town of Sweetbriar with her face six inches from mine and her breath caught and mine gone entirely.
The crowd lost its mind. Somebody whooped.
The ohhhh became a long delighted wooooo, the sound a town makes when it has just watched two people it has been gossiping about for weeks accidentally confirm every word of it, and I heard my Aunt Aggie’s voice cut clean over the top of it, triumphant—“Pay up!”—and watched Elizabeth go pink to the roots of her hair under the lights.
She stepped back and patted the ribbon flat against my chest, twice, brisk, recovering.
“Wear it with pride,” she told me, loud enough for the front rows, and then, just for me, under the noise, fast and quiet and a little unsteady, “you have no idea what you look like right now,” and she turned and went back to her microphone before I could answer, and I stood there pinned and grinning like a fool in front of everyone, and did not mind a single part of it.