Chapter 4 Loading Day

The festival grounds sat on the old fair field behind the church, and by the second week of planning the field had begun to look less like a meadow and more like a small city being built in a hurry. Cyrus arrived at seven in the morning with a clipboard, which Tilda had come to understand was less a tool than a personality. The pie pavilion was a long white tent staked at the edge of the field, open on one side to the walking path and closed on the other against the wind, and inside it stood a wood-fired oven built from river stone, a long service counter, and a wall of empty shelves that Cyrus was already mentally dividing into zones. He had drawn the zones on paper. He had brought the paper. "You color-coded the shelves," Tilda said. "I labeled them. There is a difference." "There is a difference," she agreed, "and it is that you own too many pens." They had been assigned a work morning, which meant they had been assigned each other. Bernadette had called it a load-in. Tilda called it an experiment in how long two adults could carry furniture past each other in silence. The answer, it turned out, was twenty minutes, after which Cyrus dropped his end of a folding table on his own foot and Tilda laughed so hard she had to sit down. "I heard that," he said, hopping. "I wasn't hiding it." Tuppence Bramwell arrived at eight, seventeen years old and vibrating with the specific energy of a girl who had been told to stay home and had not. She worked the register at Butter & Crumb on Saturdays and had spent the whole planning period lobbying to run the pavilion's till, and she arrived today carrying a laminated sign that read TIPS ARE NOT OPTIONAL and a thermos of something Tilda hoped was coffee. "Cyrus!" Tuppence said, delighted. "I brought you a croissant from across the street to see if you can tell." "That's my croissant," Cyrus said. "Technically it's a croissant," Tuppence said. "From Tilda's shop. Which is across the street. Do you see what I did." "I see exactly what you did, and I am not going to grade it." "For science." Cyrus took the croissant. He took a bite. Tilda watched him do it, which she had not meant to do, and which she immediately pretended she had not done, but not before she saw his face change, just slightly, the way a man's face changes when a thing is better than he wanted it to be. "It's fine," he said. "You closed your eyes," Tuppence said. "I did not close my eyes." "You closed your eyes for two whole seconds. I counted." The loading went on. Cyrus, to his credit, carried the heavy things without comment and did not once tell Tilda how to organize her half of the tent, which she had fully expected and had prepared three replies for. She found herself, by mid-morning, watching him more than was useful. He was careful with equipment in a way she recognized from her own hands. He set things down softly. He wiped dust off surfaces that no one would see. It was the behavior of a person who had learned to treat his tools as the only stable thing in the room, and Tilda knew that behavior well, because she had learned it in the months after her mother died, when the shop had been the only voice in her life still talking to her. A sack of rye flour split on the ramp and bloomed across the gravel in a slow white cloud. Tilda swore. Cyrus looked at it, then at her, and then did something unexpected: he took off his fancy apron, folded it neatly, set it on a chair, and knelt down in the dust to gather up the flour with his hands. "That's going to be in everything," Tilda said. "It already is," Cyrus said. "Come and help before the wind takes it." She knelt beside him. They scooped the flour back into the sack with their hands, which was pointless, because most of it was already lost, and they both knew it was pointless, and they did it anyway, side by side in the gravel, and something about the pointlessness of it made the morning bearable. "That's my last bag," Tilda said, not meaning to say it. It slipped out in the companionable silence the way true things do, and she regretted it immediately, because a man like Cyrus Ashby would store a sentence like that and use it later. But Cyrus only said, "Then we'll use mine for the trial. It's a stronger rye. It's meant for this." It was the first time he had offered her anything without attaching a condition, and Tilda did not know where to put it, so she put it nowhere and kept scooping. At eleven, an old man in a flat cap appeared at the mouth of the tent and stood there, watching them work with the calm of a retired person who had decided that the world was a television set and that his job was to comment on the plot. "Elwood Farnsworth," he announced, though no one had asked. "I've been buying bread on Saffron Street since before either of you could reach the counter. I hear you two are making a signature." "Word travels fast," Cyrus said. "Word travels at the speed of Bernadette Swayne," Elwood said. "Which is faster than light, and with more paperwork." He shuffled in, looked at the empty shelves, and nodded at nothing. "Good tent. Bad acoustics. The wood oven runs hot on the third day of a festival, when the wind turns. Somebody should know that. You two look like people who like to know things." "Who told you about the wind?" Tilda asked. "Nobody," Elwood said. "I noticed. That's different." He shuffled out again, and paused at the door. "Your mother," he said to Tilda, without looking at her, "used to make a thing with currants. In the cold. Small ones. Heavy as stones and warm as a hand. I have thought about that bread for thirty years. That's all. I'm old. I get to say it." He was gone before she could answer, and Tilda stood in the middle of the pavilion with flour to her elbows and her throat full, and Cyrus pretended, with great thoroughness, to be reading his clipboard. For the rest of the afternoon they worked in a quieter rhythm, and by evening the tent had counters and shelves and a chalkboard and a hand-lettered sign that Tilda had made and Cyrus had, after a long negotiation, agreed to hang. She wrote BUTTER & CRUMB on one side and THE GILDED WHISK on the other, in letters of equal size, because Bernadette had insisted and because, Tilda realized, hanging the sign felt less like surrender than she had feared. She was packing up when she saw Cyrus stop in the doorway, looking back at the tent. The evening light came through the open side and turned the flour dust in the air to gold, and the empty pavilion looked, for a moment, like somewhere a person might want to be. "It's going to work," Cyrus said, to no one in particular. "That's the most optimistic thing you've ever said." "Don't tell anyone." He picked up his clipboard. "The trial is at your shop. Six in the morning. Bring an appetite." "I'm not eating your experiment." "Then bring a brave face," Cyrus said, and walked out into the dusk, and Tilda stood alone in the pavilion a moment longer, wondering why a man accepting her oven felt like a compliment. ---