“Okay, enough of that.” Maren claps the sugar off her hands and sniffs, hard. “I have eleven dozen pies to move and a ribbon to win in the Baked Goods category. Somebody grab something so the judges think I’m a draw.”
So we do. Then, because the first thing was divine, we grab more things.
Maren flags down a teenager, hands him the tongs, and tells him he’s on commission, twenty percent of everything he moves. Then she loops her arm through mine, and the day folds the five of us up into it.
A barker over by the games is hollering himself hoarse. Step right up, test your strength. Reed hearsmen among the boysand visibly cannot let it stand, but Maren tows me past it first, because there’s a quilt-and-needlepoint tent she wants to be appalled by, and a champion jar of bread-and-butter pickles with its own blue ribbon.
At the ring toss, Reed runs a steady, doomed campaign, four dollars in quarters gone to rings that skip off every bottle in the rack. Then, on what he swears is his last toss, a ring drops clean over a neck and stays. A bored teenager hands him a stuffed bee the size of a loaf of bread. He carries it back to me through the crowd on two flat upturned palms, and goes down on one knee in the trampled grass.
“For you,” he says. Dead serious.
“I have no words,” I tell him, taking the bee and kissing him on the mouth.
It’s not a long kiss, but when I pull back, Reed stays where he is, looking up at me. The grin slides clean off his face, replaced by something dumber and softer.
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. Youspent 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 doesnotknow 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.
