Page 24 of Kid Gloves

"Booth or counter," she says, and then, without waiting, "booth," and installs us in the front window like a nativity.

The menus arrive. Mine has an insert. Laminated (laminated, the woman laminated it, there are laminated economics happening) a neat card clipped to the specials page:

THE NEIGHBOR SPECIAL—two plates, one check. Comes with whatever you two are calling it. No substitutions.

I look up. The entire diner is looking somewhere else so hard it's a form of looking. Wade reads his own insert with the expression of a man reviewing casualty figures.

"Loretta," he says.

"Wade."

"How long have you had these printed?"

"Since the fire." She refills his cup without being asked, hip against the booth, triumphant as a bugle. "Ellie Boone's grandbaby and the Mercer boy who's been buying her fence wire and telling Earl at the co-op it's 'inventory.' Sweetheart, I've had these printed since the fire."

I turn. "You've been buying my fence wire?"

"This is an ambush," Wade tells his coffee.

"It's a diner," Loretta says. "Two Neighbor Specials?"

"Yes," I say, before he can negotiate. He glares at me. I clip my laminated insert into my shirt pocket like a medal, maintaining eye contact.

The professional agreement gets drafted right there over pie at nine in the morning, because we are adults with a federal contract between us and some things do need saying. Terms: on the clock, it's Boone and Mercer, program first, no exceptions — the pups certify in six weeks and nothing muddies that. Off the clock is off the clock. Nobody's job is a hostage. If it breaks, we break it like grown-ups, with the schedule intact and the goats held harmless.

"Reasonable?" I say.

"Reasonable." He shakes my hand across the table, warm and dry and ridiculous, and we are the picture of professionalism for the eleven entire minutes it takes Loretta to bring the pie, at which point he reaches across without a flicker and takes the bite with the most cherries off my plate, and I let him, and Myrtle Voss's fork stops halfway to her mouth two tables over because apparently that reads louder than the kiss at the trailhead.

"Violated," I say. "In spirit. Sub-clause four."

"Cherry allocation wasn't in the agreement."

"It was implied⁠—"

Jake arrives the way weather arrives. He doesn't sit so much as occupy, spinning a chair from the next table, straddling it, and laying his phone face-up between us with the ledger page open like a warrant.

"Don't mind me. Official business." He taps the screen. "The bracket's under review. Wanda's frozen the pool pending a ruling, on account of the winner."

"There was a kiss bracket," Wade says. "Not a—" he gestures at the general concept of Tuesday—"bracket."

"The kiss bracket is the ruling in question." Jake's grin should require a permit. "Memorial Day was mine. Beau had the Fourth. And then Deputy Ochoa — who is in the pool, which is its own governance issue — files eyewitness testimony from a certain trailhead, and Wanda declares the window closed, and the payout goes to—" he pauses, savoring it like pie—"Cash. 'Sooner than all of you.' Four words, forty dollars a word. He collected last night. He smiled, Wade. Visibly. Winnie has questions about whether he's sick."

"Tell Wanda—" Wade starts.

"Tell Wanda yourself, she's putting up the new board. Wedding bracket." Jake spins the chair back, kisses the top of my head like an annoying archangel, and is gone before either of us can file an objection, trailing "Congratulations, the county's so happy" at a volume calibrated for the retirees' table.

The retirees toast us with coffee cups. All of them. In unison. Rehearsed.

"I love it here," I say, horrified, meaning every word, and Wade puts his hand over mine on the laminated insert, in the window, in front of the entire eight a.m. congregation, and lets them see him do it, this man who alphabetizes his fear, and honestly the pie could've been cardboard, I wouldn't know, I was busy.

Main Street afterward is a gauntlet with hanging baskets. Earl at the co-op steps out onto his own sidewalk to shake Wade's hand about nothing—"that inventory working out for you?", and retreats wheezing at his own joke. Myrtle Voss stops us dead outside the pharmacy to inform me that her cousin knew my grandmother, that Ellie Boone once delivered a foal in a Easter dress, that I have her hands, and that "the Mercer boys all needed a woman who wasn't scared of weather," delivered while gripping my wrist and looking at Wade like a judge passing a lenient sentence. The church Facebook, per three separate sources, has posted a psalm with no caption, which the entire county correctly understands to be about us.

"Does it stop?" I ask Wade, at the truck.

"Dean and Callie got a parade float."

"A float."