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* * *

He drove past the school on his way home.

He did this because Birch Street was a reasonable route and he’d already been on Birch Street that week for Vera Hutchins’ car and had noted mentally that it cut about four minutes off the usual way home, which was a practical observation about a practical route.

He didn’t slow down.

He didn’t look.

He noticed, without meaning to and without slowing down or looking, that the light in the last classroom on the east hallway was still on. A warm yellow rectangle against the early evening. He could see, just barely, without looking, the suggestion of movement behind the glass. Someone reorganizing something. Someone still working when the day was over.

He drove home.

He made dinner, something simple, something that required attention but not much thought, the kind of cooking he’d been doing for himself since he was twenty-three and had never bothered to change because it worked and he wasn’t the kind of person who changed things that worked.

He ate at the kitchen table.

He thought about the east wall shelf, which was now level. He thought about Vera Hutchins’ Buick, which was now running correctly. He thought about the playground board, which was now solid. He thought about the Pattersons’ groceries, which had been on the porch when the sun came up.

He did the dishes.

He went to bed.

He lay in the dark and listened to the sounds the house made, old sounds, familiar sounds, the settling of a structure that had been in the same place for long enough to know itself, and thought, with great deliberateness, about the Henderson water heater, which was on the list for Thursday, and the east booth dimensions for the festival, which Nora had been right about, and the restocking order that needed to go in by Friday.

He thought about all of these things.

He fell asleep thinking about a classroom light.

Chapter 7

Harvest Preparations

The festival committee met on a Thursday evening in the back room of The Brook, which was technically a storage room but which Nora had long since repurposed for exactly this kind of thing, folding tables pushed together, mismatched chairs, a whiteboard on the wall that had been there so long it was part of the room’s identity. Allison had been told about the meeting by Lauren, who had been told by Molly, who had told her in the tone of someone conveying information that was also an invitation that was also an expectation.

“Is this optional?” Allison had asked.

Molly had looked at her with gentle amusement. “Not really.”

She went.

* * *

The committee was eleven people, which was either large or small depending on your frame of reference, in the city, eleven people in a room meant a meeting that would take two hours and accomplish forty minutes of work. In Merrybrook, she was discovering, eleven people in a room meant the kind of focused collective energy that came from people who had done this before and wanted to do it well.

Rory was there with a folder of historical photos from previous festivals going back forty years, which nobody had asked for and everyone was glad existed. Helen Marsh was there representing the school, which would have a booth. Rick Brennan was there representing the market, loudly, with opinions about the location of the food vendors that he expressed three times with increasing specificity. Nora ran the meeting with the efficiency of someone who had been running this meeting for decades and had long since stopped pretending it required more ceremony than it did.

And there was a woman across the table who Allison hadn’t met yet.

She was perhaps seventy, with white hair cut short and practical and eyes that were doing something Allison recognized after a moment as the same thing Nora’s eyes did, moving over the room with a comprehensive awareness that didn’t miss much and didn’t make you feel watched. She had the look of someone who had been comfortable in her own skin for long enough that comfort had become something quieter than that, something more like settledness.

She was looking at Allison.

Not rudely, the way you looked at someone you’d been wondering about.

Allison looked back.

The woman smiled. It was the kind of smile that arrived all at once, fully committed.