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Every ten steps somebody calls his name. Ethan! Hey, Harris! Is that your truck blocking the fire lane? He lifts his cup to each of them, answers every one by name. He gets a wave or a groan or a shouted comment about his haircut. I'm starting to wonder if anyone in this town has been left out.

"You know everybody here," I say.

"I've known most of them since I was in diapers. They'd tell you I wasn't a good baby."

"What kind of baby were you?"

"Loud." He glances down at me. "Some things don't change."

"Is that why they all look at you like you owe them money?"

"They're keeping a pool. On how long I can behave. I keep losing."

He's smiling when he says it, but he doesn't look away. Neither do I. The wind chooses that moment to blow my hair across my face. Before I can get it, he reaches over and hooks the strand behind my ear with two fingers. His knuckles drag down along my jaw on the way back, lightly.

Plenty of people have put their hands on me. Most of them were holding a clipboard at the time.

"You're not from here," he says.

"No."

"Visiting."

"Until Monday."

"Where are you staying? Everything within twenty miles is booked for leaf weekend. Last year a bus tour ended up sleeping at the fire station."

"My grandmother's house. Up the hill."

"Which hill?"

"Whitaker."

He stops walking, so I stop too. In the lantern light something goes across his face, surprised and then soft. The joking leaves it completely.

"Nell," he says.

"You knew her?"

"Everybody knew Nell." He rubs the back of his neck with the hand that isn't holding the cup. "She caught me in her trees when I was nine, stealing apples off the low branch. I was ready to be murdered. She handed me a bag and told me to pick the ones without bruises, because anybody could steal fruit but not everybody could be bothered to steal it properly."

A pause. His voice goes quieter. "I'm sorry, Carolina. I'd have said so sooner if I'd known."

My throat does something unexpected. "That sounds like her. She was a terrible judge of character. She liked everybody."

"She sold me my first pie, too. Wouldn't take money. Said I'd earned it for not crying when I fell out of the tree." He tips his head toward the far edge of the green, where the lantern light thins out. "There's a shortcut to her place from behind the church, if you want it. Through the orchard."

"Through the third row," I say. "There's a gap in the stone wall."

"You know it."

"I got lost in it once. I was eight. She found me sitting under a Northern Spy eating a windfall with a worm in it."

"What did she say?"

"Good. You're getting your protein."

His laugh is big and warm and comes out of his whole chest. We cross the green with our cups cooling and our shoulders almost touching. The noise falls away behind us. The fiddle and the speaker and a child shrieking about a prize. We reach the old stone wall and the gap in it. I step through first. The dark closes over us.