“You don’t know that,” I reply.
“She’s been learning the rules for three hands. She’s going to extrapolate and she’s going to win.” He looks at Tristan. “The ring toss. First go, she was testing the physics. By the third throw she had it.”
“I was watching the axe throw,” Tristan says.
“First throw was exploratory,” Archer adds, without looking up from his cards. “Every subsequent throw was precision.”
I turn my attention to him. He looks at his cards.
“You’ve all been watching me,” I accuse.
“You’re very watchable,” Jack says, with the absolute simplicity of someone stating a weather fact.
The table is quiet for a beat.
Ryan, who has not said anything for this portion of the conversation, looks at me across the table. “Yes,” he says. Just that.
I look at my cards.
I inexplicably and questionably win the round.
The closing weekend announcement happens at nine. There’s a tradition—Jack explains it while Tristan makes tea—where the last two days of the carnival get a closing ceremony, held at the central stage. The full town comes out for it. Music, the mayor doing a short address which Jack says is always exactly seven minutes long because the mayor has done this seventeen times and has it fixed, the lighting of something ceremonial.
“You have to come,” Jack urges.
“I was going to—”
“You were going to say you’d think about it.”
“I was going to say yes,” I say, which is true, which I would not have said two weeks ago.
He looks at me. Something in his face does a soft,unguarded thing. “Good.”
* * *
We walk to the central stage as a group and it’s the most natural thing that has happened in two weeks, which is saying something given that natural has been happening gradually, incrementally, without my permission.
We walk in the formation that has become our formation, which I’ve noticed and not commented on. Ryan at my left, slightly ahead. Jack at my right, slightly behind. Tristan level with me, close enough for easy contact. Archer behind, his presence that familiar cold-air pressure at my back.
They don’t discuss this arrangement. They don’t negotiate it. They just find it, every time.
I’ve stopped fighting the warmth of it.
Main Street is full. The whole town is out with the energy of a community doing something it does every year and enjoys every time. People greet the pack as we move through, greet me in the same breath, theand Lolathat has started happening as a matter of course, the way you include someone you’ve absorbed into your understanding of a group.
Elsie from the gas station grabs my arm briefly as we pass, says something about the stall that I respond to, and when she releases me Ryan guides us around the cluster of people at the stage area, his hand briefly at my back.
His hand at my back is different from Saturday at the pier. Saturday it was weighted. It was the near-bond pressure, the everything at once, the pull I stepped away from. Tonight it’s easy. Like a door held open. No pressure. Just:this way.
I go this way.
We find a position at the stage edge with a good sightline. The mayor begins at exactly nine o’clock. Jack mouths along to the opening sentence, which apparently doesn’t change year to year. I look at him doing this and the laugh surfaces again. Archer is beside me, his shoulder against mine is warm and solid and he doesn’t move it away.
The mayor’s address is, as promised, exactly seven minutes.
The ceremonial lighting is a suspended lantern above the stage, larger than the individual ones from opening night. When it goes up, the crowd makes the sound it made before, that communal exhale of people seeing something that still works on them after sixty years of seeing it.
I watch the lantern rise.
