第18章 After the Lanterns

The festival ended on the Sunday, and the town took the tents down in the gray light of the morning, and Cyrus discovered that a small town can clean up an entire fair field in four hours if everyone in it has an opinion and a wheelbarrow. He and Tilda worked the pavilion together, striking the lanterns and folding the shelves and packing the trays, and it was the strangest thing, because the work had not changed at all. The work was the same work they had done for weeks. But somewhere between the kiss at the fountain and the folding of the last shelf, the silence between them had turned into a different silence, a comfortable one, the silence of two people who had stopped hiding and had not yet gotten used to the relief of it. They carried the last of the trays across the field and back to Saffron Street in the afternoon, and Tilda unlocked Butter & Crumb, and Cyrus stood in the doorway of his own shop across the street, and for a moment they were exactly where they had been for a year, two people separated by forty feet of pavement and a feud, except that now the feud was gone and the forty feet was just forty feet. "So," Tilda said, from her doorway. "So," Cyrus said, from his. "Come over." He came over. She made coffee in the diner mug. They sat in the back room of her mother's bakery among the flour bins and the cooling racks, and they said the practical things first, because both of them were practical people and both of them had learned, in the last month, that the practical things were sometimes the most honest way of saying a feeling. "Two shops," Tilda said. "One street. That's the problem." "Is it a problem?" "It's a problem if we're still rivals and it's a problem if we stop being shops. I'm not closing Butter & Crumb. That shop is my mother's and it's mine and I'm not putting my name under yours on a door, and you're not putting yours under mine." "I wouldn't ask you to." "I know. That's why I'm marrying you." Cyrus choked on his coffee. Tilda watched him do it with great satisfaction. "I didn't mean that," she said. "I meant it as an expression. It's a thing people say." "Is it?" "No," Tilda admitted. "I meant it. But not yet. Ask me again in a year, when I've paid you back every cent of that check and can look at you without seeing a bank ledger." "Deal," Cyrus said, and set the mug down, and looked around the back room of her mother's bakery, at the flour bins and the cooling racks and the crooked loaf on the shelf that she still, every morning, set out first because the crooked ones sold first and her mother had said so. "But the two-shops thing is a real question, and I think I have an answer that isn't a merger." "Go on." "There's a courtyard behind us," Cyrus said. "Back of my shop, back of yours, one wall, one gate nobody uses. I looked at it last week. It's the property line and it's ours on both sides. If we open the gate, we'd have the only courtyard on Saffron Street, and we could put tables in it, and a string of lights, and do the coffee out of one side and the bread out of the other, and people could sit and eat the Lantern Twist where it was made, and neither shop would have to become the other." Tilda stared at him. "You've been standing on a property line for a year and you only just thought of opening a gate." "I only just thought of the gate the week I fell in love with you, so you can imagine how the rest of my brain was doing." She laughed, and then she got up and went to the back window and looked out at the courtyard, and then she came back, and she sat down beside him instead of across from him, which she had never done, and she said, "Okay. The gate." They opened the gate that week. It took Cyrus an afternoon and one crowbar and one bruised knuckle, and it took Tilda the whole of a Saturday to plant the beds along the wall, and by the end of the first weekend in November the courtyard between Butter & Crumb and The Gilded Whisk was the nicest place in Gingerbrook that nobody had known was there. They strung the leftover festival lanterns along the wall, because they could not stand to put them away, and they put out four tables, and a sign that Tilda made and refused to change, which said SAFFRON STREET COURTYARD — BREAD ON ONE SIDE, PASTRY ON THE OTHER, NO FIGHTING ALLOWED (MUCH). Word of the gate got out before the paint on the arch had dried. On the first Saturday, Mrs. Marigold arrived at opening with a folding chair she had decided the courtyard needed, installed it in the corner nearest the wall, and announced that she would be keeping an eye on things. Tuppence came in at eight and reorganized the tables into a shape she described as better for traffic, which meant better for tips, and when Cyrus tried to move one back she looked at him with the flat confidence of a person who had learned from Bernadette Swayne and had learned well. By ten there were twelve people in the courtyard. By noon there were twenty. And by one o'clock Elwood Farnsworth had claimed the table nearest the stove and was pretending, unconvincingly, that he had come for the coffee. The bread went out of one door and the pastry out of the other, and the two of them met in the middle, over and over, all day, carrying trays past each other through a gate that neither of them had known a week ago they owned. Tilda did not once say out loud that the courtyard was working, because saying a thing like that was how you lost it, but she caught Cyrus watching her across the tables more than once, and knew, without either of them speaking, that he was doing the same silent arithmetic. At three, in a lull, she wiped the last table and found a small square of paper tucked under the sugar jar: Cyrus's handwriting, four words, nothing else. First batch is ours. She folded it into her apron pocket, next to the bank letter that she no longer needed to hide, and went back to the bread. That first evening, when the tables were out and the lanterns were lit and the shops were closed, Cyrus and Tilda sat in the courtyard with two coffees and one dog and no customers at all, and watched the light move on the stone wall, and did not talk about the tent or the bake-off or the bank. "I want you to know something," Cyrus said, after a while. "The night I fed your dog out of my pocket, before we'd ever spoken, I told myself it was practical. Yesterday's ends, waste not. It wasn't practical. I've never done one practical thing in my life where you're concerned. That's the whole of it." Tilda leaned against him. "I know," she said. "I saw you do it once, across the street. That was the day I started to lose." ---