7. Faye
seven
Faye
Rue has claimed a table in the community hall parking lot by staking it with four pumpkins.
It's the last Saturday of October and the whole lot smells like woodsmoke, pumpkin guts, and somebody's deep fryer.
Trestle tables down the middle, a bin of donated pumpkins from a farm out on the flats, a hundred people in toques.
The market's packed up for the weekend down at the field and the vendors have come straight here with their folding chairs.
They've got that end-of-season look, generous with the leftovers, giving away bruised pears because they're not hauling them home again.
The line up is longest at the honey stall.
Somebody's playing music nobody is listening to.
"This one's mine, this one's Dad's, this one's Faye's, and the little one is a spare."
"A spare pumpkin," Gideon says.
"In case someone ruins theirs." She looks at him. "It's for you."
"It was one time."
"It was two times."
This is the first time the three of us have been out in public as a unit. I've thought about it more than I'd admit. I’ve been worried about being the city girl in a small town.
Here's what happens: nothing.
A woman with a stall at the market says hello to Gideon and hands me a paring knife without being asked.
Somebody's grandfather asks if I'm the one doing the drawings for the mill's new yard, and when I say yes, he tells me his opinion on where the entrance should go for eleven minutes.
Two of Gideon's crew come by with coffee and one of them says "hey, Faye" like he's said it a hundred times.
Nobody blinks. This valley has decided about me and forgot to send a memo.
I gut my pumpkin. It's a horror show. I cannot get a clean line into a curved surface to save my life.
"Your cat looks like a hand."
"It's a fox."
Rue leans over to inspect it and says, with real diplomacy, "It could be a fox if you squint."
Gideon’s pumpkin ends up with a face on it that has an actual expression, sceptical and slightly amused, and I look at it and then at him and understand he's carved himself.
Under the table, his knee is against mine, and it stays there.
That's the thing I've been noticing all night. He’s so…
present. There's a hand on the small of my back when I step over the bench.
There's the way he passes me the good knife without looking.
There's his knee against my leg for an hour and a half, deliberate, steady, and every time he shifts his weight I feel it in my stomach.
At one point he leans across me to reach the marker pen and his forearm brushes the front of my coat, and it takes him slightly longer to come back than it needs to, and when he sits back he doesn't look at me at all. His ears are red. I decide it's the cold. It is not the cold.
On Friday morning, fifteen minutes after I told Northbend no, I called my firm and gave four weeks' notice with an offer to consult remotely on the Oak Bay campus through the spring, which they took, because it turns out the thing I was most afraid of losing was interested in keeping me either way.
I have an email in my phone from the mill's builder about the new lumber yard — six acres of layout, drainage, a sight-line problem on the road approach that I've already solved twice in my head at three in the morning.
It's a smaller project than Oak Bay by an order of magnitude.
Gideon's hand finds mine under the table. He doesn't say anything. His thumb moves once across my knuckles, and his grip is not gentle, and I turn my hand over and hold on.
When the light fades, we light the pumpkins and set them along the top of the low wall at the edge of the lot. Forty-something of them, uneven, glowing, half of them terrible.
Rue runs off to find her friends. Gideon stands behind me and puts his arms around me in front of the entire town, and I lean back against him and feel him breathe.
The cold comes down off the mountain the way it does here after dark, quick and total, and the woodsmoke drifts across the lot, and up on the bench above the mill sixty-one acres sit in the dark with the frogs asleep in the creek mud, and none of it is for sale.