Page 46

“Thank you,” she said. “Sophie’s is... did you see Sophie’s?”

“The hardware store one.”

“She painted it from where she stood. That’s what I asked them to do. I didn’t tell her to put the store in it, she just...” She stopped because she was explaining a nine-year-old’s artistic choices to a man who probably had better things to think about and she was going to stop. “It’s good, is all. She’s good.”

“You’re teaching her to see,” he said.

She looked at him.

He looked at the panels. “What you’re teaching them. It’s not painting. It’s how to look at something.”

She was quiet, because she’d been teaching for eight years and nobody had ever said it that way and it was exactly right.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what it is.”

He nodded, once, looking at the panels. And then he looked at her, and she looked at him, and neither of them moved to go anywhere, which was how they ended up walking the festival together, not by decision, just by the absence of a decision to do otherwise, both of them moving in the same direction without discussing it, the festival happening around them.

* * *

They walked the whole of it.

She showed him Earl’s birds (she still had the sparrow in her pocket) and he looked at them with the attention of someone who understood craftsmanship and said he’s been doing this twenty years, he’s better than he thinks he is, which was exactly what she’d said and which she noted and filed away. They stopped at Joseph’s booth because the line had finally shortened, and Joseph himself handed Shane something wrapped in parchment without Shane asking for it, your usual he said, which meant Shane had a standing festival order at Sweetgrass that she found deeply charming, and handed Allison an apple fritter that was still warm, and she ate it standing at the edge of Joseph’s booth and made a sound she wasn’t entirely dignified about.

Joseph smiled at her with the warmth he had, wide and genuine, the smile of a man who fed people because he loved them and knew it worked.

“Good?” he said.

“I don’t have words,” she said.

“That’s the right answer,” Joseph said, and turned to the next person in line.

They walked past the historical photos along the fence line (Rory’s contribution) and she stopped at one from what looked like the 1960s, a group of people in front of the gazebo, the same maple tree behind them decades younger.

“Is that Roy?” she said. She wasn’t sure why she knew. Something in the set of the shoulders of the man on the left, the quality of his stillness even in a photograph.

Shane looked at it. “Yes,” he said. “1963. He would have been about thirty.”

She looked at the photograph. At the thirty-year-old Roy Colter standing in front of a gazebo that was still there sixty years later, in a square that still had the same maple tree, in a town that the world had apparently forgotten to ruin.

“He looks like someone worth building a town around,” she said.

Shane was quiet.

“He was,” he said, and this time the two words had the same weight as always but there was something else in them, something that might have been gratitude, or something older than gratitude, the feeling of someone who has been given back a piece of something.

She didn’t say anything else.

She didn’t need to.

* * *

She made him laugh once.

It happened near the cider booth, when she made a comment about Rick Brennan’s ongoing feelings about the vendor spacing, something she’d been quietly tracking since the planning meeting, and Shane looked at her with the beginning of something expression she’d seen twice now and then, for just a moment, actually laughed. A quiet sound, controlled in the way all his sounds were controlled, but real, surprised out of him, the laugh of someone who hadn’t been planning on it.

He looked almost startled by it.

She tucked it away like the carved sparrow.