12. Jessica
Jessica
I called June Parker on Monday morning and asked her to coffee.
Not a meeting. Not a presentation. Not a follow-up with an agenda, or a data deck or timeline that would reorganize twenty years of someone else's work into something more efficient. Coffee. At Dottie's. Nine o'clock. Just the two of us.
She was already there when I arrived — corner booth, hands wrapped around a mug, watching me cross the diner with an expression that said she was reserving judgment and the reserve had a shelf life.
"June." I sat down. Put my bag on the seat.
Left my laptop in it. Put my notebook on the table, then thought better of it and put that away too.
My hands felt wrong with nothing in them.
I wrapped them around the coffee Dottie had already poured — she'd seen me coming through the window and had the mug down before my ass hit the vinyl.
"Jessica."
"I owe you an apology."
June's eyebrows rose. A quarter inch. The rest of her face didn't move.
"I came into that meeting like I was presenting to a boardroom in Manhattan.
I had a vision for what this festival could be, and I delivered it like you and your committee were shareholders who needed convincing instead of the people who built the damn thing.
" I took a breath. "I talked over you. Specifically.
You were mid-sentence, and I cut you off, and I didn't even notice I was doing it until someone pointed it out to me later, and I —" The words snagged. I swallowed. "I'm sorry. I was wrong."
June looked at me across the table. The reserve was still there, but something behind it shifted — a crack in the mortar, light getting through. "Who pointed it out?"
"Hunter."
The crack widened. The corner of June's mouth moved. "That boy doesn't say much."
"No. He doesn't. Which is how I know he meant it."
June picked up her coffee. Took a slow sip. Set it down. Her hands were weathered — knuckles thick, nails short, the hands of a woman who had been building things with her time and her body for decades.
"What do you want to know?" she said.
"Everything. I’ve been gone for so long that I forgot what matters to this town. I need to know what I'm missing. What you've learned in twenty-two years that I don't know and can't get from a spreadsheet."
June talked for forty minutes. She talked about the families who'd been coming to Founders Day since before I was born — the Hendersons and the Sullivans and the Parkers and the Walkers, three generations deep, their kids running the same stalls their grandparents had run.
She talked about Billy Walker's barbecue stall — how Billy had built the smoker himself from an old water tank, how his daughter Shelly ran it now and still used Billy's rub recipe that he'd never written down because he kept it in his hands, and how moving that stall from its spot by the oak tree would feel like moving Billy's grave.
"People don't come for the layout, Jessica.
" June turned her mug between her palms. "They come for the feeling.
The stalls in the same place every year.
The music facing east so the last song plays into the sunset.
Shelly's brisket by the oak tree. That's not inefficiency.
That's memory. You move it, and you might save twelve feet of foot traffic, but you lose something that doesn't go on a spreadsheet. "
I’d had no idea. My throat tightened. I picked up my coffee to cover it.
She talked about the music stage and why it faced east — not for acoustics, for the sunset.
Because the last act always played as the sun went down behind the courthouse and the light came through the square, and people stopped moving and stood together and watched.
"Every year," June said. "Every single year.
The music plays, and the light comes through, and the whole town goes still.
You can't plan that. You can only make room for it. "
I listened the way Hunter listened. Completely. My body still. My mouth shut. My hands around my coffee, and nothing in my head except the sound of this woman's voice and the decades of care sitting underneath every word.
When she finished, I said, “I won’t make these mistakes again. You have my word on that.”
June's face changed. Her shoulders dropped. Something arrived behind her eyes — careful, still assessing, but warmer than anything she'd given me in six weeks of committee meetings. The beginning of something that might become respect if I didn't fuck it up.
Hunter was right, Clara Mae Henderson had a mind for spatial design that I would have murdered for on my New York team.
I discovered this on a Tuesday afternoon at the community hall when she pulled out a hand-drawn map of the festival grounds — not to scale, not pretty, but brilliant.
She'd mapped foot traffic patterns from memory.
Twenty years of watching people move through the square, noting where they gathered, where they stalled, where the bottlenecks formed, and why.
"If you move the craft stalls here," she said, tracing a line with her finger, "you open up a natural corridor to the food vendors. People don't backtrack. They flow."
I stared at her map. Then at her. Then back at the map.
"Clara Mae, this is better than the layout I spent three weeks building."
Her cheeks went pink. She straightened in her chair. "Well. It's just what I've noticed."
"It's not just what you've noticed. It's genius. Can I steal this?"
She looked at me like I'd handed her a trophy. "You can borrow it," she said. "I'll want it back."
Dorothy Sullivan showed up to the next session without her glasses perched on top of her head, which meant she was willing to look at me directly instead of through the lens of years of doubt.
She had opinions about crowd flow that made my data deck look like finger painting.
Rose Martinez brought handwritten notes about what the community actually wanted — not what the data said they should want, what they'd told her over kitchen tables and after-church coffees and at the counter at Dottie's.
The meetings changed. I brought coffee instead of PowerPoints. The chairs formed a circle instead of rows. Ideas arrived from every direction and collided and merged and the results were messier and louder and better than anything I could have built alone.
Something in me eased that had been braced since New York. I sat in those meetings with Clara Mae's map spread across the table and Dorothy's crowd flow notes in my hand and June's voice in my ear and I was enjoying myself — really, truly enjoying myself — in a way I hadn't in years.
The problem wasn't the events. The problem was my eyes.
It was Tuesday afternoon, and we were three coffees deep into the planning session for the Harvest Festival at the community hall, and I was mid-sentence about the vendor insurance requirements when Hunter came through the back door with his toolbox and headed for the PA system.
The capacitor had fixed the buzz on Friday, but something in the speaker bracket had started rattling on the high notes during yesterday's choir rehearsal, according to Dorothy Sullivan, who had reported the rattle to me by phone with the same gravity she would have used to report a body in the parking lot.
I kept talking. My mouth formed words about liability coverage and certificate requirements. My eyes betrayed me completely.
Hunter’s fingers moved on the wiring with a precision that made my stomach clench — sure, deliberate, the pads of his fingertips testing connections the way a musician tested strings.
He twisted a wire between his thumb and forefinger, and I watched the tendons shift in the back of his hand, and my lower belly tightened, and I lost my place in the sentence and had to find it again by looking at my notes.
Three minutes later, I was watching his mouth.
He was leaning against the wall, talking to Tom Morrison about the speaker bracket, his voice a low rumble I could feel from across the room.
His lips barely moved when he spoke — the economy of a man who didn't waste motion on communication any more than he wasted it on anything else — and I was staring at the shape of them.
The lower lip fuller than the upper. The way they pressed together when he was thinking.
The way they'd felt against my forehead at the Showcase — warm and soft and deliberate.
My pen had stopped moving. Dorothy Sullivan cleared her throat. I looked down at my notebook, and the last three lines were the same sentence written twice and a squiggle that might have been a word or might have been a cry for help.
Hunter reached up to adjust a cable above his head. Both arms extended. His shirt pulled tight across his shoulders and rode up at the back. I caught a strip of skin above his belt and the muscle that framed his spine and my entire train of thought went off a cliff.
"— which brings us to the question of —" I stopped. Six faces. Waiting. Dead silence. I had no idea what I'd been saying. "Sorry. Lost my place." I shuffled papers. Smiled. "The question of per-vendor allocation."
Dorothy Sullivan looked at me over her glasses. Then Hunter. Then back at me. Her mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile, but was absolutely a verdict.
The fake touches were banking heat I hadn't authorized.
Every fake gesture was also a real one. Every time his hand found my back, I leaned in faster.
Every time his arm went around my shoulders, my body fitted itself against his with less resistance.
The gap between performing and feeling had been narrowing for weeks, and I could feel it closing — something inevitable building in the space where the pretense used to live, pressing against the walls, looking for a crack.