第17章 The Parade

It rained all night and half the morning, and by the time the bell rang for the Grand Harvest Bake-Off the field had turned to a soft brown mud and the town had put on its boots and come anyway. Tilda had not slept. She had lain awake listening to the rain on the roof of the shop and running the timing of the Lantern Twist through her head the way she ran it through her hands, and at four she had given up on sleep and gone to the pavilion and found Cyrus already there, which had surprised neither of them. They had fired the oven against the wet. They had proofed the final batch in the cold of his walk-in one last time. And now, at eleven in the morning, in a tent that dripped at the seams and smelled of rye and warmth and rain, the judges sat down at the long table at the end of the field, and the county's Grand Harvest Bake-Off began. There were six entries. Tilda knew them all. The pumpkin growers had sent a pie. The diner had sent a cobbler. One of the neighboring towns had sent a woman with a chest freezer and a business card, who had clearly come to win and had clearly practiced, and whose entry was a thing of layered glass and spun sugar that the crowd had gathered to look at the way you look at a jewelry window. Tilda and Cyrus carried the Lantern Twist to the table together, on the tray Tilda's mother had used, one of them at each end, and set it down, and stepped back. The lead judge, a small sharp woman with reading glasses on a chain, cut into it. She looked at the crumb for a long time, holding the slice up to the gray light. She smelled it. Then she tasted it, and chewed, and said nothing, and wrote something down, and Tilda, watching, felt her whole life sit down in her chest and wait. The second judge, a large jovial man, tasted his and said, "Well, that's a proper thing," which was not helpful, because it might have meant anything. The spun-sugar woman's entry was beautiful. The judges spent a long time with it. The rain kept coming, and the lanterns in the tent swayed on their wires, and the crowd stood in the mud in their boots and waited, and Tilda stood at the back of the tent with flour still on her hands and did not dare to look at Cyrus, because if she looked at him she would know what he was feeling, and she did not have room for two people's worth of hope. Then the lead judge stood up. "We don't usually do this," she said, "because in this county we like to give out a first, a second, and a third, and everyone goes home with a ribbon, which is a fine tradition and I respect it. But this year we have a decision that isn't a decision. There is one entry on this table that could not have been made by any one person, and that is the point of it. It carries two techniques that fight each other, and someone has made them agree." She picked up the slice. "The Grand Harvest Bake-Off goes to the Lantern Twist, of Saffron Street, of Gingerbrook, made by two shops that I am told cannot stand each other. I would like to hear from them." The crowd made a sound that Tilda would remember for the rest of her life. It was not a cheer exactly. It was the sound a small town makes when something it has been hoping for quietly, for a long time, finally happens in front of it, and it carries, all of it, and it is not at all quiet. Tilda could not move. Cyrus could not move. Tuppence, at the register, screamed loud enough to startle the geese on the field. Bernadette Swayne was weeping openly into her cardigan sleeve and denying it to everyone within reach. And Elwood Farnsworth stood at the edge of the tent in his flat cap and his mud-caked boots, and looked at the tray, and looked at the two of them, and nodded once, slowly, the way he had nodded the first morning at the pavilion, which from Elwood was the whole of a standing ovation. They walked up to the table together. Cyrus made a small bow to the judges and said something modest and precise that Tilda did not hear, because the blood was roaring in her ears. And then the lead judge said, "I'm told the bread half of this is a family recipe. Is that right?" Tilda found her voice. "My mother's," she said. "It's her book, my mother's recipes. She ran this pavilion for twenty years. She never got to make a thing like this, because she never had anybody to fight with about the salt." She caught herself. She heard how it sounded. She did not take it back. "It's hers and it's mine and it's his. It's the three of us." The crowd made the sound again, and this time it was a cheer, and the rain came down on the old fair field, and the lanterns swayed. The parade went out at dusk, and the town, being a town, did it in the rain. The lanterns went up on their wires anyway, strung between the lamp posts and the fountain and the church rail, and the whole square filled with them, orange and gold and red, glowing through the wet, and the brass band played, badly and with great spirit, and the field drained into the streets and became a river of light. Cyrus and Tilda walked it together, on the outside of the crowd, both of them soaked and neither of them caring. Pretzel, who had spent the bake-off being fed by three separate townspeople under the table, trotted between them with his ears doing the two different things they did, the ambassador of the whole affair. At the fountain, near the middle of the square, under a lantern that someone had hung a little crooked, they stopped, because the crowd was thick and they could not go any further, and because neither of them wanted to. "So," Tilda said. "The best day of my working life. Again. Two days running. It's a trend." "I want it to be a trend," Cyrus said. "I know." "I've been trying all day to think of a way to say this that isn't the worst thing anyone has ever said at a parade, and I can't find it, so I'll just say it. I'm in love with you, Tilda Quimby. I have been since the morning you threw flour at me. It is the least convenient thing that has ever happened to me and I would not trade it for the whole city." Tilda looked at him. The rain was coming down through the lantern light and making everything soft and gold, and the band was murdering a waltz by the church, and the whole town was standing around them pretending not to listen, which in a town like this was the same thing as listening. "Good," she said. "Because I've been keeping it a secret from myself for a month, and I'm a terrible liar, and it's been exhausting." And she took his face in both her floury hands, and she kissed him, in the middle of the square, in the rain, under a crooked lantern, with the whole of Gingerbrook watching and pretending not to, and the crowd, which had waited a very long time and placed a great many bets, dropped the pretense entirely and cheered. Pretzel barked. Tuppence collected on the jar. Mrs. Marigold told the mayor she had predicted it in the spring. And Bernadette Swayne, standing off to the side with her cardigan sleeves wet to the elbow and her clipboard held over her head like a hat, watched the two of them and smiled the small, satisfied smile of a person whose plan had worked exactly the way she had always told everyone it would. ---