Page 15

"Hollis," he says. The name, a sentence. "I'd have found one."

We sit with that. The sun moves another inch on the grass.

We come back around the Granary twenty minutes later and nearly walk into Ruth, who's standing at the jam table with her arms folded and a jar of pear-ginger in one hand.

"Hollie," she says.

I stop. Ben stops with me, his hand still in mine.

She looks at him, then holds out her free hand. He takes it. She turns it over, examines the scar like a loaf of bread, testing for something only she knows how to find.

"My Walt had one like this on his shin," she says. "Navy. Shrapnel. I could always tell a man by how he shook hands."

"Yes, ma'am."

She lets go and looks at me. Her eyes go bright behind her bifocals. "You're wearing yellow."

"It's mustard, Grandma."

"It's yellow," she says, firm, "and you just stood through four cannon shots without flinching. You didn't use to be able to do that."

I don't know what to say. She knows. Of course she knows.

"He can come to Sunday dinner," Ruth says. She shoves the jam jar at Ben. "Bring this. It's pear-ginger. Don't shake it."

She walks off. Ben looks at the jar in his hand as if he's been handed a live grenade.

"Your grandmother just vetted me," he says.

"She did."

"With jam."

"It's how she communicates."

"Does this mean I passed?"

"You're holding pear-ginger," I say. "You passed."

When Bunny finds us, ten minutes later, with a paper lantern the color of an apricot in one hand and her clipboard in the other, I'm sitting with my head on his shoulder and his thumb is slowly tracing the seam of my glove.

"Number forty-one," she announces. "Walk starts at nine, from the bandstand, don't be late, and wear something warm."

She peers at me over her glasses. "And Hollis. Whatever's in that closet you've been saving, tonight's the night."

She sweeps off again. Ben looks at me with one eyebrow raised.

"She doesn't know," I say. "She can't know."

"She knows everything."

"She's a municipality."

I walk home beside him with the lantern swinging from my fingers and his hand around my other one. The town turning to watch us pass.

At my door, he stops at the bottom of the steps. We look at each other. The half-sentence in the air between us is loud enough to hear.

"Five-thirty?" he says.