This is the beginning of something permanent, still becoming itself.
I’m going to need to be ready when it does.
And so will she.
Chapter 16
Lola
All week, I’ve been following the same pattern. I do prep work with Tristan all day and enjoy the carnival at night. I help out where it’s needed and have fun when it’s not. Toward the end of the night, one of the guys always finds me and walks me back to the pack house.
Every night, they offer me a room to sleep in. They insist they have a spare one, a guest room. Jack is the first to offer his own bed if I’m more comfortable there. But I always choose the couch. It feels right at the moment. A room would be too permanent. It would be like I’m choosing to make this less temporary.
Saturday arrives like a held breath finally released. The carnival at full weekend capacity is a differentcreature than anything I’ve been moving through this week, and I know this from the moment I step onto Main Street at nine in the morning and feel the change in air pressure.
The town has expanded overnight. The population of Sweetwater Valley has apparently doubled or tripled, cars lining every approach road, families and groups moving through the main street with the energy of people who have been anticipating this and are ready to spend that anticipation.
By the time I get to the stall it’s already loud.
Tristan is calm. This is one of the things I’ve noticed about him, the way his baseline doesn’t shift with the noise around it. He runs the same pace at full-service as he does at prep. He’s unhurried, everything in its place, and when I tie on my apron and take my station he nods at me with approval.
“Why’s it so much busier this week?” I ask. I swear last weekend only had a fraction of the amount of people.
“There’s fireworks this weekend,” Tristan replies, like that explains everything.
I still don’t get it. Maybe it’s a Sweetwater Valley thing. Perhaps these country folk don’t get to see fireworks too often.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Always,” I say.
The first rush hits at ten and doesn’t stop.
Working the stall in full service is different from prep. Prep is quiet and internal and tactile. This is external,constant, the demand of high-volume service where your hands are doing one thing and your brain is doing three others. The noise is continuous and the crowd is a physical pressure at the serving window.
I find it, unexpectedly, steadying.
Not calming. That’s a different thing. Steadying, the way that being in motion is steadying for me. Having a task that requires all of my bandwidth so that the other bandwidth, the part that runs Amber and law enforcement and evidence chains, has to stand back.
Tristan and I run the stall in a rhythm we’ve built over the week, and it holds under the load. He doesn’t tell me what to do and I don’t wait to be told. By noon we’ve served more people than I’ve interacted with in the previous month combined and the stall smells like everything he’s made. I’ve eaten two pieces of fried dough standing at the prep station between rushes, which is the fuel-to-function approach I’ve developed under his influence.
Jack appears at the window at with the energy of someone who has been doing seventeen things simultaneously and is running on pure enjoyment.
“How’s the service?” he asks.
“Constant,” I reply.
“Good constant or bad constant?”
“Is there bad constant?”
He grins. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.” I mean it, which surprises me every time. “The stall is well-designed. Traffic flows.”
“I’ll tell Tristan you said that. He spent three years arguing for that stall position.”
“He was right.”
