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Pie of the Day: Strawberry Rhubarb.
Allison had lived in Merrybrook long enough to know what that meant.
Celebration.
* * *
The festival started at noon, and it was the second one she’d ever seen, and it was even more itself than the first.
The smell reached her before anything else. Woodsmoke from the fire pit. Cider warming at the Brennans’ booth. Joseph’s apple fritters, twice a year and not a single time more, the line already twenty deep. The maple in Founders Square was on fire with color, and the mountains stood up behind the town the way they always did.
She had built the entrance arch again. Deep orange ribbon. It caught the light exactly the way she’d planned.
And this year the student art display didn’t fit on a fence.
It took up the entire north wall of the square. One long mural, sixty feet of it, painted on panels Shane had cut and sanded and hung, and every single child at Merrybrook Elementary had a piece of it. It was the valley. All of it. The lake and the mountains and Main Street and the gazebo and the hardware store and The Brook, the whole town painted from two hundred and forty different places where two hundred and forty different kids stood. Marcus had done the sky, because nobody else understood what color a Merrybrook sky actually was. And down in one corner, very small, careful and precise, Sophie had painted a house on the north shore with a low roof and a big window facing north.
Sophie had never been out to the north shore. Allison had never told her about the house.
Allison stood in front of that corner for a very long time.
People stopped all day in front of that wall. She watched their faces as they looked at it. It was the same look she’d seen at her first festival, the look of people seeing their children clearly. Except this year, more than one of them turned around and found her in the crowd, and just nodded. The way Merrybrook nodded. We see what you did.
* * *
Rory’s historical photos were on the fence at the edge of the square, the way they were every year. Seventy years of the same gazebo. The same maple. Different people standing in the same place.
She found the photo from 1963. A man with broad shoulders and a stillness about him, standing on the gazebo steps in front of an old iron switch box.
And right beside it, in a new frame, a new photo.
Two people on those same gazebo steps in the snow. The tree blazing gold behind them. His arm around her waist. Her face turned up to his.
A small hand-lettered card was tucked into the bottom corner of the frame. Shane Colter and Allison Hayes. Tree Lighting, December. Merrybrook Historical Society.
“Told you somebody would want it,” Rory said, appearing at her elbow with a folder under one arm, the way Rory always appeared.
She couldn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Rory just stood there beside her for a moment, looking at the two photographs side by side, and then noticed her left hand, and very quietly took a small notebook out of their jacket pocket and wrote something down.
“For the records,” Rory said.
* * *
And everyone was there.
Doug was over by the cider booth talking to Rick Brennan about something that had both of them laughing, which Allison had never once in her life seen Doug do. There was a new pen clipped in his shirt pocket from last Christmas, and she knew there would be another one this year, and a tin of pencils going the other way.
Lauren was across the square at the school booth, pretending with enormous dedication not to watch Ben Keller, who was helping Joseph carry a table and pretending with equal dedication not to be watching her back. And three feet away, Charlie Keller, taller now, thirteen, braces on her teeth and a festival wristband on each arm, was watching Lauren watch her father, with an expression of total and complete innocence that fooled absolutely no one.
Oh, Lauren, Allison thought, for the hundredth time that year. Soon.
Harold Finley was at Earl’s booth of carved birds, examining a wooden heron and pretending not to be with Margaret. He glanced over at Allison once. He saw her hand. He gave her the nod. The one that meant a finished piece of carpentry had come out exactly right.
Margaret saw her hand about four seconds later, and screamed, and dropped a caramel apple.
Claire and Henry stood by the gazebo steps, and on the rail above Claire’s head sat an orange cat, and Claire was not looking at it, and Allison was not going to think about it.
Becca and Kevin had driven up from the city for the weekend. Becca took one look at the ring and sat down on a hay bale and burst into tears, and then got up and hugged Shane so hard he made a small startled sound, and then went straight to The Brook and ordered a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie and asked Nora what was in it, and Nora said, “Maybe it’s the water,” and Becca looked at her sister across the whole square and mouthed, I get it now.
