“Coming!” Will calls automatically, and then winces; it’s not his house. Or, well, no, itishis house, technically, but no one is likely to be coming by for him. But Casey doesn’t yell anything down, so Will decides he might as well follow through on his promise, however automatic it might have been. He leaves his shoes on the mat, and his clothes, after a moment’s agonized thought, in a tight little ball on top of the shoes.
The knock sounds again, annoying Will; don’t they know he’s working on it? “I’mcoming, you’re going tolive,” Will snarls, not caring how much he sounds like himself at fifteen, but he does hurry the last few steps to the door.
It’s Noel on the other side, because why wouldn’t it be.
“You,” Noel says, as thoughthey’rethe aggrieved one of the two of them. Then, their jaw dropping open: “Oh my God, is that the new sweatset? For the store? For Christmas? He said we weren’t allowed to see them yet! He said we had to wait until we put them out for the guests—I drew the design on thatone, you know,” Noel says, pointing proudly at Will’s sweatshirt.
Will looks a little closer and realizes that what he’d thought was a Christmas tree is, in fact, a little apple tree, one fruit still on it like an ornament, strung loosely with string lights. In spite of being swindled by this child earlier this very afternoon, Will can’t help but feel a certain fondness for them as he looks upside down at their handiwork. “I like it.”
“Thanks,” Noel says, grinning and then ducking their head, seeming abruptly to go shy. It only lasts a merciful half a second, though; after that they lean over Will’s shoulder, stick their head into the body of the house, and yell, “Hey, Casey!”
A pause. Then, filtering down from what sounds like quite far away, “Yeah?”
“You know this dude’s in your house, first of all?” Noel gives Will an apologetic look at this, as though sorry to blow up his spot. “In the Christmas sweats?”
“Yes, Noel. Is that all?” Casey’s voice sounds closer now, like maybe he’s leaning over the stair landing.
“No. Mrs. Baumcombe is at the market? She’s here to pick up her order for next Saturday.”
A pause. Then, wearily, as though knowing there’s little point in saying it: “Is she aware that it’s currentlythisSaturday?”
“Yes,” Noel says, as solemnly as one can while yelling to a person on a different floor. “And yet. There she is! Hungry for the pies of next Saturday. Twelve of them, in fact.”
Footfalls on the stairs; then Casey appears on the landing, changed into a pair of charcoal jeans and a new, less wet flannel shirt, this one grey-and-black plaid. Eyebrows up, he says, “Do we not have twelve pies we could give her now?” He makes eye contact with Will and, with an odd, hard to read expression, pulls a small lump out of his pocket and wiggles it at him, then tosses it over.
Will catches it, barely, and realizes after a second that it’s a pair of clean, dry socks.
“Oh, easily,” says Noel, not seeming to notice Will’s wide-eyed, blinking surprise at all, and punctuating it with a wave of their hand. Will gets the sense that they’re really enjoying themselves, and maybe thought about how they were going to present this on the way over here. “We have pies enough to fill her request and then some! But she doesn’t want any of the pies we have. She wantsherpies, Casey. That we’re going to be baking. Specifically for her. And no one else.NextSaturday. When she ordered them.” With a wide, beatific grin, they add, “I’m terribly afraid she wants to see a manager.”
“Christ almighty,” Casey mutters, reaching the bottom of the stairs. “Of course she does.” He turns and, putting a hand to the back of his neck and not quite meeting Will’s eyes, says, “You’re welcome to hang out here, if you want, but there’s more to eat at the market, so. You can borrow a pair of my extra boots, if your shoes are still drying out. Over on the mat by the door.”
Feeling the heat of Noel’s curious stare drilling into his skull, Will tells himself very firmly not to flush, or rub at the back of his neck, or go on any kind of face journey at all—teenagers can smell fear. He simply steps into a pair of Casey’s workboots, which are worn and broken in and about half a size too big for Will, but should be fine enough for walking around in, and says, “Thanks.”
“Sure,” Casey says, without looking at him, and leads the way out of the house.
Will notices as they do it, that they’re all, without having to talk about it, taking the Unofficial Market Employee Rainy Day Break Run Route. Nobody who had worked in the market when Will was a kid had wanted to spend a second of their break time in there if they didn’t have to. He’d passed them outside in the parking lot, or, if the weather was particularly brutal, huddled up in one corner of the farmhouse’s wraparound porch, prayingOld Bill wouldn’t see them and kick up some dramatic fuss. And if he did, the trick to get from farmhouse to market without getting wet was just a matter of knowing where to step in the tight little tree line, hugging close to it around the back end of the field, letting the trees shield you from the worst of whatever the sky wanted to throw at you until you could dash under the cover of the market’s large awning.
Will finds himself oddly exuberant to be doing it now, hastily clamping down on his grin when he notices Casey looking him over assessingly. It’s just…the familiarity, he thinks, that’s all. Like singing a song you’ve forgotten over the years, only to realize, bar by bar, that all the words are still floating around inside you, packed away in a corner but never lost. Will is pleased, in spite of the hopes he’d had at the time, not to have burned away all he once carried of Glenriver and the farm, and the life he’d thought, once, was the only future he’d ever be allowed.
Maybe it’s this spirit that carries him into the backed-up market, oddly crowded for such a rainy afternoon. Maybe it’s this spirit that, as Casey picks up the frustrating pie thread with Mrs. Baumcombe and Noel steps back behind the safety of the apple display, moves Will not only to round the corner into the bakery, but to take a deep breath, and start walking towards the counter.
It’s good to see the old bakery again, even if there’s a line of irritated-looking people waiting to be helped. It’s good to smell the rich mixture of apple and vanilla and caramel and butter, somehow just as Will remembers it and also deeper, more refined. It’s good to hear the soft purr of the flame in the commercial ovens lick on and off, more soothing than any white noise machine.
But mostly, it’s good to see Daphne Cardini-Johnstone right where he left her, new lines on her face but her hair that same shade of bottle-fresh auburn.
“Daph,” Will says, drawing her attention away from her customer, as he takes a hesitant step into the disputed territory between “Customers Welcome” and “Only Staff Allowed.” It’s a question in more ways than one—Will has no idea, honestly, how this interaction is going to go. He’s known Daphne since he was born, but she was his mother’s friend and Bill’s, more than she was ever his. She might react like Mere did, with tears and hugs, but she also might tell him to stick it where the sun dares not shine. Daphne could be like that, sometimes. Unpredictable.
She turns. She looks him up and down. She grins.
“Tell you what,” she says, “About twenty years ago, you didn’t show up for your Saturday shift and really messed up my weekend plans, but—better late than never, right? You, next in line; give Will your order, let’s get this moving.”
“What, did you just hire him off the street?” the customer demands. “Who is he?”
“Well,” Daph says, cutting Will a sly sidelong look, “I’d say he’s the owner, but rumor has it not for long.”
“Oh,” the customer says, relaxing even as Will tenses—God, he’d forgotten how quickly gossip travels in this little town. “Well, theowner, that’s all right, then.”
Thus mollified, he deigns to give Will the courtesy of his order, which is for several donuts, a pie, and one of the bakery’s signature apple turnovers. Will packs it all up, marveling briefly at the new logo on the stickers with which he closes bags and boxes, which combines that of Cardinal Bakery and the new Robertson iconography. The bakery started running their production out of Robertson Family Farms sometime in the ’70s, and Will knows it was Daphne who’d kept it going after Bill took things over on the farm side. Daphne’s mother, old Mrs. Cardini, had decided within a few months that Will’s father was fine enough as far as company went, but she couldn’t workwith him.
