"But you want to beat it."
"More than almost anything," he says pleasantly.
I laugh as the tasting room goes dark around us. Bev has turned on the warming lights in the pub next door, the amber glow coming through the interior window, and we're still at the table and at some point he's moved to my side of it without either of us deciding that was happening.
"The festival entry is yours too," he says. "Your pairing, my beer. That's a collaboration."
"I didn't brew anything."
"I built the beer for what you'd tell me it wanted to be next to. I just built it before you arrived." He looks at me. "You finished it."
My notebook is open in front of me. The pairing specs in my handwriting, layered and corrected, the way my kitchen notebook used to look when I was developing something real.
"I should go," I say.
He walks me through the pub. The regulars look up, he greets a man at the bar by name and asks about his daughter's hockey game, receives the answer, moves on and I watch the full pub version of him, wider and more expanded than the tasting room version, and think: same person, different room. He has a fermentation room version and a pub version and I keep finding new ones and they're all him, all the way down.
He turns and catches me watching. Holds it for a beat. Something acknowledged without either of us saying it.
On the covered porch, with the last of the light going and the herbs still holding their end-of-season smell, he says: "Stay for the festival."
I say: "I'll think about it."
And then he kisses me. Unhurried, the way everything he does is unhurried — his hand coming up to my jaw, his thumb along the line of my cheekbone, his mouth gentle at first and then not gentle. I lean into it for three full seconds before I register what's happening and then I don't try to un-register it. I just let it happen, the way you let a good beer sit on your palate when you finally stop thinking about it.
When he pulls back he's still close, his hand still at my jaw.
"Think faster," he says.
"That's not how thinking works," I say, a little breathless.
He grins, puts his hands in his pockets, and goes back inside.
I stand on the porch in the dark for a long time. The valley is spread below the treeline, Silver Ridge lit up warm and specific, and from the brewery behind me comes the sound of the pub at the end of a Tuesday — low voices, Bev's laugh, the percussion of a glass set on the bar.
I know, standing there with my heart beating like a fluttering hummingbird, that I'm not leaving for Vancouver after the festival.
four
Hops
ThejournalistPatrickShanfieldhas a reputation that precedes him.
He's written about the regional food and drink scene, he's been in the brewery once before, two years ago, a brief visit that generated three sentences in a roundup piece. He's staying at Silver Lodge, which means he crossed paths with Sage, which means she knows he's in town before he comes to find me.
She comes in that Thursday morning and something is different. She's been coming in most mornings for the last week, sitting in the tasting room with the festival beer and her notebook, and there's been a looseness to her lately. She’s getting comfortable.
This morning the looseness is gone. She's carrying herself the way she did in the first week: contained, efficient, closed.
"Patrick Shanfield is in Silver Ridge," she says. She's standing at the tasting room door, not coming in. "He covered the kitchen incident in Vancouver." She says it looking at a point past myshoulder. "He wrote that it was my fault. The piece got picked up. It's how most people in the industry first heard about it."
I know enough to be quiet. So this isThe Incident; the reason she burnt out.
"What happened," she takes a breath, "was not my fault. A prep cook made a mistake with a hot holding unit. A diner got sick. Nobody was seriously hurt. But the kitchen's executive chef was well-regarded, well-connected. It was easier to say the sous chef dropped the ball. I didn't contradict it publicly because I was already burning out and I just." She stops. "I just left."
I'm looking at her. She’s looking at the floor.
"Shanfield is re-running the piece," she says. "An old food scandal, new venue, local-girl-gone-to-ground angle. I heard from Mara this morning. It'll publish before the festival ends."
