Chapter 40 #2
Across the way the strength-test barker is still going, and Bram has heard enough. He pays his dollar, takes up the mallet, rolls one shoulder, and rings the bell so hard on the first swing that the man running it takes the mallet back out of his hands and asks him, politely, not to do that again.
Reed loses his entire mind. “THAT’S MY brOTHER,” he informs the crowd. “WHO ARE THE MEN AMONG THE BOYS NOW.”
Two stalls down there’s a fortune-teller’s tent hung with scarves, a hand-painted sign reading MADAME EVANGELINE SEES ALL, and Ash has been standing there watching her work for a solid minute, arms folded, openly admiring.
“She’s good,” he says. “Watch. She hasn’t asked that couple a single question and she’s already got the wife’s whole life off her shoes and her hands. That’s craft.”
Maren is already towing me toward the flap. “We’re going. Come on. I need to know if the bakery makes it and whether I marry rich.”
Madame Evangeline is about sixty, with reading glasses shoved up into a truly committed wig, and a crystal ball I’m fairly sure is a gazing globe from a garden center. She takes one look at the four of us crowding into her little tent and her eyes light up like a slot machine.
“Sit, sit.” She waves Maren and me onto two folding stools. She takes Maren’s hand, turns it over, runs a thumb across the flour into the creases. “You work with your hands. With heat. You feed people, and you never once let them see when you are tired.”
Maren’s grin slips for just a second.
“Okay,” she says, recovering. “That one’s free, my apron literally says bakery on it.”
“And you.” The woman turns to me, and her face settles, goes a degree more careful. She takes my hand and holds it. “You. You spent a long time making yourself small so nobody would look too close.” Her thumb moves once over my knuckles.
Jesus. No soul-gazing without a permit, please.
“Ten dollars,” I say, deflecting. “For ten whole dollars I’d like you to tell me something I don’t already know.”
Madame Evangeline looks at me a moment longer. Then she lets me off the hook and picks up the garden-center globe, gazing into it. “I see... a ribbon,” she intones. “I see... a very large fruit.” She squints into the globe. “And I see a man with a squash, who is about to have a very bad afternoon.”
“She IS good,” Maren breathes.
Ash pays her twenty and tells her, sincerely, that it was a pleasure to watch a professional.
Maren and I end up on a hay bale with a cider doughnut between us, breaking off pieces, watching a square dance come slowly apart in the next field, eight red-faced farmers going forward and falling back and colliding.
Maren tips her head toward a stall across the way, where a wiry old man stands guard over a single squash the size of a car seat, arms crossed, accepting tribute from a small crowd.
“See him?” she says. “That’s your competition. I heard him say earlier he’s got it locked up this year.”
“He doesn’t know about the apple,” I say.
“He does not know about the apple.” Maren tears off another piece of doughnut, solemn. “Wait until he gets a look at that baby-sized monster.”
We trade a grin and dissolve into giggles.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Bram comes and lowers himself onto the grass at the end of the bale, close, so his shoulder settles in against my knee, and reaches a paper cup of warm cider up to me without a word.
The heat of him soaks straight through my jeans.
It’s a good warmth. A settled, Saturday warmth.
And it’s exactly the warmth that nudges my memory awake.
Because my own heat is impeding and runs about a week. A week is a lot of time away from a deadline with two million dollars riding on it. There are pills for that. There are ways to make myself easier to schedule around, and I’ve been turning one over and over at the back of my head.
I look at Bram’s neck, he turns his head and catches me looking, and for half a second something crosses his face, there and gone, maybe the same math as mine, who knows, before he smooths it over and bumps his temple against my knee.
***
The light’s gone long and gold, my face sore from smiling.
Cal climbs up onto the pallet stage and the microphone shrieks once under his hand.
“FOLKS.” He thumps it twice with two fingers. “If you put something into a contest today, get on up front. If you didn’t, get up here anyway and holler for the ones who did.”
The crowd folds in toward the hay bales. Maren has my arm in a grip, and she’s gone dead quiet.
“You’ve got it,” I tell her, feeling the steady, warm presence of my alphas behind me.
“Don’t.” Her eyes don’t come off the stage. “You say it, you jinx it.”
Cal starts small. Best jam. Best dozen eggs, which is apparently a real and bitter rivalry. A ribbon for bread-and-butter pickles that goes, to the shock of absolutely no one.
Then: “Baked goods.”
Maren makes a sound with no air in it.
There’s a row of three judges up there, paper plates scraped down to fork-tracks and crumbs in front of them, and the heavyset one in the middle leans over and says something in Cal’s ear. Cal nods, taking his sweet time, while I feel Maren’s fingers dig into my arm.
“Third place... Suzanne Fox.” A woman two rows up goes pink and bustles forward for her white ribbon.
“Second... Jasper Kowalski.” A teenager shoved up the aisle by his mother.
“And the number one ribbon for baked goods goes to...” Cal lifts his eyes off the card and waits a beat, enjoying himself thoroughly. “Maren Merigold with her pie made out of Miller apples.”
Maren lets out a high, shaky squeak, drawing a few amused looks from the crowd. Her face breaks right down the middle and goes pink and streaming at the same time, both palms slapped flat over her mouth.
I get my arms up under hers and pick all five feet of her off the grass.
“Market research,” I say into her apron.
“So worth the trip,” she says, laughing.
“Don’t be shy now, Lakeview!” Cal booms over the top of us. “Come on up here!”
Somebody behind us hollers “LAKEVIEW,” and somebody clear across the crowd hollers it back, and Maren scrubs her whole face on her sleeve and goes up to take the blue ribbon of victory. The look she throws me over her shoulder on the way, I’m keeping.
Maren walks back into the crowd, clutching her blue ribbon. I grab her arm, smiling, and we squeeze back in between the alphas.
Then Cal squints at the next card and his eyebrows climb. “Now. Next category: Most Unusual Produce.”
Delia is already moving. She comes up the side of the stage with the crate held in both hands, slow and level, both thumbs hooked over the rim, sets it on the table by the microphone, and peels the square of muslin off the top of it, slow, for the drama of it.
The apple comes out into the gold light, and the crowd does one long, helpless ohhhh.
At the foot of the stage the other contender needs no cloth and gets none: the huge squash, the wiry old man planted beside it with his arms crossed.
“Now, if this was about the biggest and most unusual,” Cal says into the microphone, “Earl’s squash would win, no contest. Look at that monster.” He points to it, and the crowd gives the squash a polite, hat-in-hand round of applause while the man nudges his neighbors and raises a fist.
“But since this category is only about the most unusual, the blue ribbon goes to...” He lets it hang for one, two, three drumrolls... “Apple Blossom Orchard, for their five-pound apple!”
And the same crowd that just gave the record squash its due breaks wide open for the apple. People lean out over the rope with their phones up. And Earl, red ribbon and all, watches a whole field turn its back on his squash to coo at a nice piece of fruit.
Reed comes undone. “I KNEW IT.” He’s got the stuffed bee up in one fist, which he gracefully insisted on carrying so my hands would be free, now jabbing it wildly at the wiry old man and the whole wide sky.
We walk up to the stage together, Ash and Reed crowding in close behind Bram and me. Bram lifts the ribbon for everyone to see then tucks it safely into his breast pocket before looking down at me with a grin.
Pretty sure this is going on the fridge, I smile.
After, it all loosens at once. The crowd breaks back apart into the stalls, the fiddle starts up again somewhere, and Maren and I end up shoulder to shoulder against the warm flank of a hay bale, her blue ribbon pinned crooked to her apron (the apple’s ribbon riding fifteen feet off in Bram’s pocket while he lets a very small girl shake his hand about it).
“What?” I ask, catching Maren watching me with a steady, knowing look.
“Nothing.” She’s grinning, and whatever she turns up there, she sits with it a second, then folds it away somewhere to keep. “You just look happy, is all. You look really, really happy.”
I feel something sitting low in my chest like the warmth off a cup of cider.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I think I am.”
Maren’s smile softens, and she nudges my knee with hers. “That being said... are you going to tell me what that flicker of something wrong was that I felt from you earlier?”