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Chapter 1 — Rosemary
Mae slides my tea across the counter like she's passing contraband. "He's tall, Rosey. Thought you should hear it from a friend."
I don't ask who. There's only one he in Bloomfield this morning, and I've been awake since three picturing him anyway: the man Ashgrove sent out from Chicago to decide which of us the mill can afford to keep.
The windows of the diner are fogged to shoulder height, the griddle spits, and the bell rings every minute or so as someone comes in for coffee and gossip.
In the back booth, two women off the night shift are still in their gray mill sweatshirts, lint in their hair, eggs going cold. They went quiet when I walked in and haven't started up again.
On the register, a flyer for the Harvest Festival has curled at one corner. My name is on it twice, once for the committee and once, God help me, for the pie table.
I take the stool at the end, the one that fits my hips without a conversation, and hook my bag over the back. There's glitter on my sleeve, gold and still tacky, in a long streak from wrist to elbow. It came off Charlotte's diorama, a shoebox forest for a book I haven't read, which she remembered at 6:40 this morning was due today.
I'll be finding gold on myself until Thanksgiving.
She was quiet at the bus stop this morning. Nine going on forty-five in her puffy purple jacket, new front teeth still too big for her face. She watched the bus turn onto Linden with her mouth set in the exact line my father's used to take when I told him I'd already eaten.
"Rosey." Mae's still holding the pot, eyebrows up. She's set my honey beside the mug in its little glass dish, the way she has every morning for eleven years. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"You were about to ask about him."
"I was about to drink my tea." I do, and it's strong enough to stand a spoon in, the first thing that's gone right today. "Fine. Tell me."
"He came in last night around nine." She lowers her voice, which in Mae means the counter only hears every other word. "Ordered the apple pie. Asked whether it was always this good or whether I'd made an exception for the occasion."
"That's a line."
"That's what I said. Then he ate every crumb, asked what time the mill opened, and left me forty percent."
"People who tip forty percent want something."
"People who tip forty percent want something," Mae agrees, "and I've had worse men want it from me. I told him if he wanted the real story on that mill, he'd want to talk to you. And that you'd argue with him."
"Mae."
"I said it with love." She sets a paper bag by my elbow, warm, grease already blooming through the bottom. "Cider doughnut. For courage."
"I don't need courage. I need him to have read something besides a spreadsheet."
"Eat the doughnut."
I take it with me, because she's right and I hate it. The bell rings behind me, and the cold meets me on the step like a slap.
My breath goes up white. I tug my sleeves down over the glitter and tuck the bag under my arm and walk with my chin up, the way you walk past a house where someone's died.
The night-shift women are watching me through Mae's windows. I can feel it between my shoulder blades, two pairs of eyes. I don't turn around, because I don't have an answer for the question on their faces.
Main Street is half awake. Someone's propped a ladder against the gazebo on the Green and is working his way along the rail with a string of paper lanterns for tomorrow. A flatbed of hay bales sits crooked at the curb, shedding straw into the gutter.
"Morning, Rosey!" the man on the ladder calls, and I lift the doughnut in answer, mouth full.
He says something about the pie table, and I say, "Noon, I know," and keep moving.
The maples are in their loudest orange, leaves already coming down in slow spirals. One lands on my shoulder and rides along for half a block. My left wrist aches in the cold, the old weaver's ache, and I shake it out and keep walking.
My phone says 7:24 and the meeting's at half past, which means I'll get there with a minute to spare if I walk like I'm angry. I'm walking like I'm angry.
