Chapter 12 What Cyrus Did

Dewey called on the Thursday before the festival, and Cyrus took the call standing in the middle of his own shop with the espresso machine hissing and the door propped open to the warm October air, and he said the word he had been circling for a week. "No." There was a pause on the line, and then Dewey laughed, because Dewey had always laughed at the moment of refusal, as though a refusal were simply a number that had not yet been negotiated. "No to which part. The door, the name, or the whole city." "All of it. I'm staying." "Cyrus. It's a town with one traffic light." "It's a town with a bakery across the street that makes a rye you could not buy in the city for any amount of money, and I would rather be the second-best baker on Saffron Street than the best pastry chef in a room full of people photographing their food." Cyrus wiped the marble even though it did not need it. "You're not going to talk me out of it. I've done the spreadsheet." Dewey was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the performance had dropped out of his voice, and what was left was the real thing, which was harder to argue with. "I met you when you were twenty-two," Dewey said. "You lived in a kitchen and you slept in a chair and you told me once that you had a person at home and the person had asked you to come to dinner and you said you'd come after service, and you didn't come for three years. I'm not saying this to hurt you. I'm saying it because I watched you walk away from the last person who loved you for a proofing drawer, and now you're telling me you're staying in a town for a woman who runs a bakery, and I want to know if you've actually noticed you're doing the same thing again, or if you're just doing it faster this time." Cyrus looked across the street through the open door. The lights of Butter & Crumb were on. Tilda was at her window, writing something on the back of an order slip, the way her mother used to. "I noticed," Cyrus said. "That's the difference. Last time I didn't notice. I have spent eighteen months learning to notice, and the first thing I noticed is that I have been very good at being needed and very bad at needing anyone, and that the woman across the street is the first person in fifteen years who has never once needed me." He paused. "That's the whole spreadsheet, Dewey. I'm not going to run her shop. I'm going to run mine, and be her neighbor, and be whatever else she'll let me be, and that is a life, and I'm choosing it." Dewey sighed, the long, theatrical sigh of a man accepting a loss he intended to bill someone else for. "Fine. But when the backers ask me who the pastry program is, I'm telling them you died." "That's fair," Cyrus said. "Tell them the small town got me." He hung up, and stood in the gold light, and felt, for the first time in a year and a half, absolutely certain of something. It lasted almost an hour. The hour ended when he walked past the bank and saw, through its window, Tilda Quimby sitting across from the manager with her hands folded and her face very still, and he knew, the way you know weather, what was being said in that room, and he made a decision that felt like love and was actually fear wearing love's coat, which is a costume it wears very well. He went to the farm first. It was two valleys over, a dairy farm with a red barn and a herd that had, according to the hand-painted sign at the gate, names. The farmer, a broad woman in a waxed jacket who knew Cyrus by his order, came out to the truck with a ledger already open, because Cyrus's butter order was the farm's largest single account and both of them knew it. "The Quimby account," Cyrus said. The farmer looked at him. "You know her." "I know her." "She's four months behind," the farmer said, without judgment, the way farmers state weather. "She pays what she can. She's good for it, mostly. I keep her on because her mother bought from my mother, and because a bakery that uses real butter is worth keeping open, and because if I cut her off she'll have to use the cheap stuff, and I'd rather eat my own hat than watch that shop go to margarine." Cyrus took out his checkbook and wrote a number on it, and the number was the amount of the arrears, and the farmer read it and looked at him with the flat, knowing eyes of a person who had seen every kind of fool. "She's going to find out," the farmer said. "I know." "She's going to hate you." "Probably." "You want me to tell her it was a grant. A program. Something. I can lie, I'm an excellent liar, I lie to the tax office every spring." "No," Cyrus said. "Don't lie. Just don't volunteer it. If she asks, tell her the truth. She should always get the truth. I just don't want to be the person who tells her." The farmer took the check, folded it into the ledger, and looked at him a long moment, and then she said the thing that would keep him awake that night. "Her mother used to stand in that shop with a stack of invoices she couldn't pay and she never once let anyone help her either," she said. "Drove her banker crazy. Drove her daughter crazy. There's a kind of pride in that family that looks like strength from across the street and is actually a wall, and you, young man, have just walked into the wall, which is a thing that people do when they love someone and can't think of anything better. Good luck. I'd say it'll be fine, but I don't like lying to you, and you asked me not to." By the time Cyrus got back to Gingerbrook it was evening, and he did the rest of it too, because a man in the grip of a bad idea does not stop at one bad idea. He went to the bank and spoke to the manager about a small business loan he had no intention of taking, and in the course of the conversation, in a moment he would replay for days, he let slip that if anyone at the bank needed a character reference for a borrower named Quimby, he would be happy to provide one, and he said it with such earnestness that the manager wrote his name in the margin of a file, which is how these things begin. He walked home through the square, past the fountain, past the first of the festival lanterns strung between the lamp posts. He felt, honestly, good. He felt like a man who had finally, after a year of keeping his hands clean and his heart closed, reached out and touched something real. He bought two coffees from the diner and drank one himself and carried the other across the street and left it on the counter of Butter & Crumb with a note that said for the meeting, because she had a festival committee meeting that night and he knew she would not have eaten. She found the coffee. She drank it. She did not know what it was for, and would not have believed it if she had. And that night, while Cyrus slept the deep sleep of a man who had done a good deed, the bank manager, being a thorough and slightly gossipy man, made two phone calls, and by morning the story of the kind young pastry chef who had quietly covered the Quimby arrears was moving through Gingerbrook at the speed of Bernadette Swayne, which is to say faster than light and with more paperwork. ---