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Me:

Good job.

Lyle:

Thanks!!!

At least somebody's day is going well.

* * *

Friday night the festival lights up and the whole valley shows up to see it.

The field is packed shoulder to shoulder by seven. Families from Durango with strollers. Couples from Denver in boots that have never seen mud. Locals in flannel who've come to judge whether the new girl pulled it off. String lights zigzag between booth poles, and the air is heavy with kettle corn and woodsmoke and fried dough. Hank Holloway runs a bar out of the back of a horse trailer with the Rusty Elk's name painted on the side. Mabel's biscuit booth has a line clear to the parking lot.

I work the Main Street end until nine. Nobody drives drunk. Nobody fights. A kid loses his mother and finds her again in the time it takes me to crouch down and ask his name. Easy work.

When my shift ends, I walk the edge of the crowd toward the bonfire.

The fire marshal lit it at eight, with his signature on file and Mona standing at his elbow the entire time. It's big now, roaring, throwing sparks up into the black sky. People ring it with cider cups and blankets. A fiddle player from Pagosa Springs is sawing away at something fast on the stage, lights bright and steady off my fixed generator.

Mona's standing near the fire with Mabel.

She's got her clipboard pinned under one arm, a radio clipped to her belt, and her hair piled on top of her head with a pencil jammed through it. She's been running since before dawn. Her shoulders are tight up around her ears. Mabel says something I can't hear and pats her arm, and Mona shakes her head.

Then a little girl in a pumpkin costume barrels past, trips over her own tail, and face plants into a hay bale. She comes up spitting straw, points at the bale, and yells, "That was RUDE."

And Mona laughs.

She drops the clipboard. Just lets it fall onto the grass and tips her head back and laughs, loud and bright, hand pressed flat to her stomach. The firelight catches her whole face. Her eyes are wet with it. Mabel laughs with her, and the kid's father scoops her up, and for a few seconds Mona isn't working. She's just a woman at a bonfire on a cold night, laughing so hard she can barely stand.

I stay at the edge of the light and memorize it.

It's past midnight when the last of the crowd clears out. The fire has burned down to orange coals. Volunteers stack chairs and haul trash bags to the dumpster behind the church. I find Mona at the empty cider stand, kneeling on the ground, peeling tape off a banner with her fingernails.

"Leave it," I tell her. "You've gotta do the whole thing again tomorrow."

"I know." She keeps peeling. "I just need a minute."

"You did it."

"Day one of two."

"Mona."

She stops. Sits back on her heels and looks up at me, and all the hard, bright energy she's been burning since dawn drains out of her at once. Her shoulders drop. Her mouth trembles, just a little.

"It went okay," she says. "Didn't it?"

"It went better than okay."

"The grant committee chair was here. She shook my hand. She said she'd see me tomorrow." She swallows. "She didn't say anything else. She just shook my hand."

"She came back twice for biscuits and asked Hank who hired the fiddle player." I hold down my hand. "She had a good night. So did everybody else."

She looks at my hand for a long moment. Then she takes it and I pull her up, and this time I don't let go.

Neither does she.