Chapter Eighteen #2
The afternoon crowd thickened. The stall did steady business through the lunch hour while Evelyn handled customers with the ease of a woman who'd worked a shop counter for years, which of course she had.
The confidence that had taken root in her over the past two weeks showed in the way she talked about her goods, praising the quality without apology, explaining the stitching, touching the fabric with hands that communicated ownership.
She'd made these things. They'd come from her labor, her skill, and her decision to spend her own savings on fabric for a stranger's cause.
She stood behind them the way she stood behind everything she committed to, steadfast and unwavering.
Sam counted the money in the tin box while Evelyn wrapped a pair of gloves for a young cowhand who couldn't stop staring at her.
Sam noted this, and filed it away under a heading he chose not to examine.
He'd lost track of the exact total, but the weight of the box told him they'd passed twenty dollars at least, maybe closer to twenty-five.
Good money. Fair money. Nowhere near a hundred and twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents, but a real dent earned jar by jar and scarf by scarf from people who'd rather spend their coin with a woman who smiled at them than a catalog that didn't.
Around two o'clock, Mrs. Montgomery tapped Evelyn on the shoulder and shooed her away from the counter.
"You two been on your feet since before the rooster crowed. Go on, now. Take yourselves a turn around the fair. I can mind this here stall my own self. I been sellin' preserves since before either of you was a thought in the good Lord's mind."
"I don't reckon we ought to—"
"I ain't askin' you, Sam Cooper. I'm tellin' you. Now git, the both of you, before I take a broom handle to your backside."
Evelyn looked at Sam. Sam looked at Evelyn.
Mrs. Montgomery had crossed her arms and planted herself behind the counter with the immovable determination of a woman who'd raised a family, buried a husband, survived fourteen years alone, and intended to spend the next thirty minutes selling jam without supervision, thank you kindly.
Sam took off his money apron and hung it on the stall post.
They walked the fair together, moving through the crowd past the food vendors, game stalls, and the livestock display where a rancher had brought a prize bull that stood in its pen looking about as enthusiastic about the proceedings as Sam generally did.
Sam had attended exactly two social events in the past six years—both of them Sarah's doing—and both times he'd spent the majority of the evening standing at the edge of the crowd with his arms crossed, waiting for the acceptable minimum of time to elapse before leaving.
He'd gotten good at edge-standing. He'd perfected the art of attending a thing without participating in it, which Sarah called "sulking with your boots on," and which Sam called "being present in a supervisory capacity. "
Today, he walked through the middle of the crowd instead of the edge because Evelyn Granger walked through the middle of everything and dragged him along by sheer gravitational force.
She stopped at a ring-toss game. Sam paid the man two cents for three rings and handed them to her.
She threw the first one wide. She threw the second one wider.
She threw the third one and by some miracle of physics, it landed squarely over a bottle.
She let out a sound Sam would remember for the rest of his life—a whoop of pure triumph that turned heads for ten yards in every direction.
"Did you see that? Sam Cooper, did you see that?"
"I saw it."
"I ain't never won a thing in my whole life! Not a single solitary thing!"
The game man handed her the prize, a small carved wooden horse painted brown with a white blaze on its nose.
Evelyn held it up and examined it from every angle, turning it in her fingers with the same care she'd give a piece of fine fabric.
A carved horse worth maybe three cents, won at a ring-toss game at a town fair in Montana Territory.
Sam bought them each a cup of hot cider from a woman selling it from a kettle near the platform.
They stood at the edge of the fair drinking it, the warmth of the cup cutting through the cold, and Evelyn told him about a fair she'd seen once as a girl through the fence of the orphanage yard.
A traveling carnival had set up in the field next door.
The orphanage girls had watched through the slats while other children rode ponies, ate taffy, and played games, and the matron had closed the shutters at seven o'clock and told them to stop looking because envy violated the eighth commandment.
She told it matter-of-factly, without self-pity or asking for a reaction. She simply presented the facts. She'd watched a fair through a fence. Now she stood inside one, drinking cider, and holding a carved horse she'd won at a ring-toss game.
Sam drank his cider. The fiddle on the platform played a tune he half-recognized from somewhere he couldn't place.
The afternoon sun sat low and gold over the mountains, and for about five minutes, the bounty poster in his coat pocket stopped mattering.
For about five minutes, Sam Cooper stood beside a woman at a fair and let himself have the afternoon without calculating its cost.
Five minutes. He'd take it. He'd earned that much, and so had she.