Chapter 40
Luna
The apple is the size of a soup bowl and it will not stop trying to roll off my lap.
“Support the base,” Reed says, for the third time, twisted around in the passenger seat to supervise me. “You’re holding it like a football.”
I tuck the towels in tighter around the five pounds of apple (Reed weighted it), red going gold at the shoulders, fat as a baby’s head, riding in my lap.
Bram found it by chance about an hour ago on a gnarled old tree at the orchard, claimed it was a sign from the heavens because, apparently, we’re entering some kind of exhibition contest at the festival.
Out the windshield, the sky is bright and blue, the morning haze finally cooked off. The road climbs and crests, and the whole of Honeycreek Hollow opens up in a green bowl below us, the creek running down the middle. Farther down, on the near bank, a cluster of white tents speckles the grass.
As we get closer, I smell frying dough and apples, then I see white tents in rows, bunting strung tent to tent.
A stage at the far end backed up against the hay bales, a banner sagging across the entrance that reads HONEYCREEK HOLLOW HARVEST FESTIVAL.
A Ferris wheel, small and a little rickety, turning slow against all that blue.
Fiddle music coming up thin and bright over the top of everything.
“Oh,” I say, and it comes out softer than I mean it to.
Ash twists fully around now, the half-smile already in place. “You’re about to find out why small festivals are the best festivals.”
Bram noses the truck into a field where a kid in a reflective vest is waving cars into rows. Then the doors are open, the noise comes fully in, and we’re out, walking, the apple heavy in my arms.
We make it maybe twenty feet.
“MILLER.” A barrel of a man in suspenders comes carving through the crowd and folds Bram into a hug that lifts him a clear inch off the grass. “You brought the whole family down. Would you look at this.”
“Hey, Cal.” Bram’s voice goes warm in a register I almost never get to hear. “This is Luna.”
Cal takes my free hand in both of his. “Knew these boys when they were knee-high and feral,” he tells me, dropping his voice. “You’ve got good taste.” Then he clocks the apple in my arms and his whole face falls open. He takes a step back. “Sweet merciful. What in God’s name is that?”
“It’s our ticket,” Bram says, and there’s a thing in his voice I’d call pride. “We’re walking out of this festival with a winner’s ribbon.”
Cal looks from the apple to Bram to me, and slowly takes his hat off, holding it over his heart. “God help the squash,” he says, and I wonder what he means by that.
We don’t get far before it happens again, and then again.
A woman with flour to both elbows flags Ash down and pushes a fork of something into his mouth before he can so much as say hello, then stands there reading his face for the verdict.
A pair of old men at the cider stand lift their cups when they see us and call out something about Hollow Gold.
A boy of about eight plants himself square in Reed’s path, holds up two cupped hands, and announces, “I caught a frog.”
“You did not,” Reed says, and drops to his haunches on the spot. “Show me this frog.”
“Just like at the pub, everybody knows you guys,” I say, once we’ve left the frog and its disputed custody behind.
“Small town.” Ash takes my free hand. “Population low, opinions high. By tomorrow morning a hundred people will have told a hundred other people that the Miller pack brought their omega down, and that she was either lovely or stuck-up. There’s no third option.”
“Which am I going for?”
“You’re a natural at lovely,” he says, easy, I roll my eyes and he grins, because he caught the half-second where I had to fight my smile down.
The produce tent smells of a hundred vegetables all scrubbed up for their Sunday best. There’s a folding table at the front, and behind it a woman named Delia, who looks at our apple over the top of her glasses for a long, professional while.
“Hm,” she says, finally. She turns a card over and writes on it in a careful hand: MOST UNUSUAL PRODUCE.
“You’ll want this category. The plain-biggest class is all pumpkins, and you’ll lose to a pumpkin every time, those people are not well.
” She lifts the apple out of my arms with both hands and sets it in a wooden crate behind her, then tucks a square of muslin over the top of it.
“It stays back here with me until judging. Out of sight.”
“Out of sight?”
“Last year somebody’s prize melon took a knitting needle through the rind an hour before the ribbons.” She pats the cloth flat. “You don’t want to tempt the devil.”
Reed’s face lights up. “Delia thinks the competition will feel threatened,” he says, laughing as the three brothers exchange a round of knuckle bumps.
“All right.” I say as we head out the tent. “Now what?”
“Now,” Ash says, holding the tent flap up for me, “we wander.” He says it light. Too light. Out in the sun he steers us, not obviously, just a hand at the small of my back angling me down the row toward the food stalls, and Reed, who is constitutionally incapable of silence, has gone quiet.
“What’s going on—” I start, but then I smell it.
Under the cider and the cut grass and the fryer oil, something else. Warm. Specific. Butter gone brown in a pan. Sugar pushed one second past safe, right to the edge of burnt. Cardamom. And cutting up clean through all of it, the high bright note of orange zest.
“I know that smell,” I say.
Nobody answers me. I turn and look at Ash, and he just tips his head down the row. Go on.
So I do. I follow my nose, three big alphas falling in behind me, and the smell gets thicker and more impossible with every stall I pass, until I come around the end of the row and pull up short.
A table stacked with apple hand pies. A tower of something glazed and gold. A hand-lettered sign that reads TASTE OF LAKEVIEW, which is eight hours away and has no earthly business being in this field. And behind the table, copper hair tied back, both hands full of pastry... is Maren.
She sees my face and both her arms shoot straight up over her head.
“SURPRISE,” she bellows, and a cloud of powdered sugar comes off her apron.
I make a sound I will deny later. My feet are already moving. I go around the end of the table, knock a stack of napkins to the grass, and get both arms around her. Man, Maren always gives the best hugs. She laughs into my hair and holds on.
“There she is,” she says, into the top of my head. “There’s my girl.”
“How,” I get out, pulling back to look at her. “You’re eight hours away. You have a bakery. It’s Saturday, you never close on a Satur—”
“Okay, so.” She holds me out at arm’s length and swipes under my eye with her thumb, her own beautiful azure eyes a little wet.
“Your alpha called me a couple days ago and introduced himself.” She tips her head at Bram, who has the grace to look caught.
“Asked would I come down and surprise you. And I said, Bram, I would love nothing more, but I cannot justify shutting the shop and driving across the state on a whim.”
“So what changed your mind?”
“So then he asks,” she says, already grinning, “had I ever considered entering a regional baking competition.” The grin goes feral.
“Babe. Regional is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But it’s a business expense.
I’m doing market research. I’m building brand awareness.
The part where I get to ambush my best friend in a cow pasture is tax-deductible.
” She drops her voice. “Also they shipped me a crate of your orchard’s apples to bake with, and Luna, they’re obscene.
I put them in the hand pies and a man proposed to me about forty minutes ago. ”
I turn around. All three of them are wearing the same face. Caught, and pleased about it.
“You did this,” I say.
“It was Reed’s idea,” Bram says, at the same moment Reed says, “It was a group effort,” and Ash says, “I had no idea until this morning.”
I don’t have words for what’s in my chest, so I reach for a joke, except it doesn’t come. What comes out instead is, “Thank you.” Small, to all three of them.
Bram’s throat moves. “Of course,” he says.
“Okay, enough of that.” Maren claps the sugar off her hands and sniffs, hard. “I have eleven dozen pies to move and a ribbon to win in the Baked Goods category. Somebody grab something so the judges think I’m a draw.”
So we do. Then, because the first thing was divine, we grab more things.
Maren flags down a teenager, hands him the tongs, and tells him he’s on commission, twenty percent of everything he moves. Then she loops her arm through mine, and the day folds the five of us up into it.
A barker over by the games is hollering himself hoarse.
Step right up, test your strength. Reed hears men among the boys and visibly cannot let it stand, but Maren tows me past it first, because there’s a quilt-and-needlepoint tent she wants to be appalled by, and a champion jar of bread-and-butter pickles with its own blue ribbon.
At the ring toss, Reed runs a steady, doomed campaign, four dollars in quarters gone to rings that skip off every bottle in the rack.
Then, on what he swears is his last toss, a ring drops clean over a neck and stays.
A bored teenager hands him a stuffed bee the size of a loaf of bread.
He carries it back to me through the crowd on two flat upturned palms, and goes down on one knee in the trampled grass.
“For you,” he says. Dead serious.
“I have no words,” I tell him, taking the bee and kissing him on the mouth.
It’s not a long kiss, but when I pull back, Reed stays where he is, looking up at me. The grin slides clean off his face, replaced by something dumber and softer.