第9章 The Cold Batch

The polite version of Tilda Quimby was the most frightening thing Cyrus had ever encountered, and by the third day he would have paid a great deal of money to have the argument instead. She did not shout. She did not sulk. She arrived at the pavilion on time, she labeled her shelves, she made her bread, and she spoke to him in the perfectly even tone a person might use with a delivery driver who had left the parcel in the rain. When he offered her the walk-in for the fifth trial, she said, "That's very generous, but I've made other arrangements." When he asked what arrangements, she said, "Ones that don't borrow from the city." And when he tried, once, to say that Dewey had been wrong, she said, "It doesn't matter what Dewey said. It matters what you didn't," and went back to work. The fifth trial failed. It failed because they were fighting inside the dough again, except worse this time, because neither of them was throwing flour. Tilda mixed in a cold, businesslike silence and Cyrus laminated with a precision that had gone brittle, and the twists came out of the pavilion oven tight and gray and joyless, and when they tore one open, the crumb was closed and the currants had sunk, and Tilda looked at it and said, "Well. There it is," in a voice that made Cyrus want to sit down on the gravel. Bernadette arrived at lunchtime, looked at the tray of failures, looked at the two of them standing eight feet apart, and did not smile. "I've been patient," she said. "I've been charming. I've been up three nights with a spreadsheet that isn't mine, which is a thing I would like on the record. But I will not put a bad bake-off in front of this town. If this tent doesn't have a signature by the end of next week, I'm pulling the pavilion and giving the field to the pumpkin growers, and I will tell the festival board exactly why." "Fine," Tilda said. "It's not fine," Bernadette said, "and you, of all people, know it, because your mother ran this pavilion before you were born, and she did it standing right next to people she could not stand, and she never once let the tent go dark." She put her hands on her hips. "I'm not asking you to like him, Tilda. I'm asking you not to lose your mother's tent because a man said a word you didn't like." That landed. Tilda did not answer. Bernadette left, and the pavilion was very quiet, and Cyrus did not dare to say anything at all. Tuppence found them an hour later, out of breath, because she had run from the square. "Pretzel's gone," she said. "Gone where?" Tilda said. "Nobody's seen him all day. Not at the shop, not at the market, not at the fountain. Elwood's been walking the whole town and he says the dog has never missed a meal in his life, so if he's missed two he's in trouble." They searched until dark. They split up and did not speak about splitting up, and they walked the town's four streets and the churchyard and the field, calling a name that belonged to a dog that belonged to no one. Cyrus checked the alley behind Saffron Street, which he had never once entered, because it was Tilda's side, and found nothing. Tilda checked the farm road and the creek and the low stone wall and found nothing. The night got cold. The harvest lights on the square came on. And near nine o'clock, Tilda thought of the one place they had not looked, and found him in the pavilion. Pretzel was curled up on the tray of failed twists, in the exact center of the exact signature they could not make, sleeping as though he had been told the tent was his and had believed it. "You," Tilda said. "You absolute menace." Cyrus arrived a moment later, winded, and stopped in the doorway. The dog did not wake. The two of them stood in the dark pavilion with the failed twists between them and the lantern light coming in from the square, and for a long moment neither of them knew what to say. "I should have said it," Cyrus said finally. "You should have." "He called your bread authentic. It's the stupidest word. He meant it as a compliment and it isn't one, and I stood there and let it stand because I wanted him to think I was better than this town." He looked at the dog. "I'm not better than this town. I'm worse than this town. I came here to hide." Tilda watched him. The polite armor had a crack in it now, and through the crack she could see the man who had knelt in the gravel to save her last bag of rye and made her a crooked croissant at the end of the day and defended her to a blogger he had no reason to defend her to. "Here's my problem," she said. "I have spent a year being angry at you, and it worked. It was very efficient. I got up, I baked, I was angry, and I didn't have to think about anything else. Then you fed my dog and carried my flour and told a stranger my rye was difficult instead of limited, and now I don't know what to do with the anger, and it's making a mess of my dough." "Mine too," Cyrus said. "So here's what I propose." She wiped her hands on her apron, and the gesture was so familiar by now that Cyrus felt it in his chest. "We stop pretending the anger is the truth. We keep it for the tent. We put it in the bake. We make the thing, and we let the town eat it, and when the festival is over, you can go back to the city with your friend, or you can stay, and either way I will not stand in your way and I will not pretend I don't care, because apparently I'm terrible at that now." Cyrus opened his mouth. "Don't," Tilda said. "Don't answer tonight. I don't want an answer I have to weigh. I want one I can believe." She scooped up the dog, who did not wake, and carried him to the door. "Six in the morning. My shop. Bring your three pens." She was nearly out when he said, "Tilda." She stopped. "The answer is no," Cyrus said. "To Dewey. It was always going to be no. I just hadn't found the person I was going to tell." Tilda stood in the doorway with the dog in her arms and her back to him, and the lantern light moved on the pavilion wall, and she did not say anything for a long moment. When she did, her voice was steady, which was how Cyrus knew it cost her something. "Six in the morning," she said again, and was gone. Cyrus stood alone in the empty pavilion with the tray of failures and did something he had not done in eighteen months. He took a failed twist, the worst one, the one with the closed crumb and the sunken fruit, and he ate it, all of it, standing up in the dark, because it had been made by two people who were trying, and because a man who eats nothing is a man who is avoiding the part where he has to want something. It tasted like failure. It also tasted like the beginning of a fix. ---