Page 15

It's past seven by the time I reach the Green. I took the long way along the river, rehearsing. The sun has just cleared the church steeple, lighting the maples from underneath, and the whole square smells like woodsmoke and fresh straw and the first batch of kettle corn.

Trucks are backing up over the grass. A flatbed's disgorging hay bales by the dozen, and a woman on a ladder is hanging paper lanterns off the gazebo rail with a mouthful of clothespins.

Every third person I pass is wearing something blue. A plaid flannel, a scarf, a throw tied at the waist like a skirt. There's a baby in a stroller wrapped in Bloomfield Blue to its chin, and it takes me a full minute to understand what I'm looking at. The mill isn't a building, it's the town's skin.

I find her at the gazebo in the middle of nine things, a clipboard in one hand and a roll of tape in the other, a flannel shirt in the mill's own plaid over a long dark cardigan, her hair pinned up under a pencil that has been abandoned for a pen.

She's talking to a man with a clipboard of his own and she's gesturing with the tape, and the morning light is lying on her like she's been gilded. When she sees me the roll of tape stops.

"You didn't sleep."

"No."

"You brought me tea."

"I'm told it's strong enough to stand a spoon in." I hold the cup out. "The honey's on the side."

She stares at it. Her mouth works and something moves across her face that she doesn't try to stop, quick and unguarded. "Mae."

"Mae told me everything except your shoe size."

"Nine and a half. Wide." She takes the cup and her fingers close over mine on the lid for one second longer than the cup requires, and the heat goes straight to the base of my spine. "You're not getting out of this, are you."

"I'm told I'm good at hovering."

"If you're going to hover, you can carry." She puts the tape in my free hand. "Tables, in the truck. Take the kid in the hoodie."

I carry for three hours. Thirty-one tables and forty-one hay bales, which I count because I'm a man who counts when he's nervous, and I stack straw in the shape of a maze with a teenager who calls me dude and a woman who tells me I'm doing it wrong.

By nine my shirt is stuck to my back and there's twine-burn on both forearms, laid over the last stubborn blue of Friday's dye house. The church bell rings ten, the barricades come down, and Bloomfield pours onto the Green in a flood of flannel and strollers and dogs.

It's a stress test, a festival, I can't help it. I see the choke point at the cider stand where the line backs into the kettle corn, I see the high-school band blocking the pie table's foot traffic, and eight hundred people with four food vendors and one gazebo.

I'd close the cider line and open a second. I'm not here to fix their festival and I keep not fixing it, and that's the first sign of how far gone I am.

The second sign is the whispering.

It starts at the edges. A woman at the face-painting table glances at me and says something to the woman beside her. Two men by the chili tent go quiet. A kid in a Bobcats jacket points. That's him. I keep walking with my face arranged in neutral, and then a man steps into my path at the cider press with a paper cup in his hand.

He's fifty, maybe, with forearms stained blue to the elbow and the particular stillness of someone who has been angry for a long time and decided to do it politely.

"You're him."

"I'm told I am."

"My brother-in-law's on the line at the dye house. Twenty-six years. He came home last night and didn't eat. His wife sat at the table for three hours." He nods at the Green, at the lanterns, the strollers, the children chasing each other through a hay maze I built. "Whatever you decide, I'd want you to decide it looking at that."

"I intend to."

"Intend." He looks at me a moment more, and I don't look away, and he drinks his cider and goes.

I stand there with straw in my hair. Rosemary told me to look at their faces. I thought I had been, all weekend. I hadn't seen one until now.

"Tiger!"

It's a small, fierce roar and it comes from behind my knee. Charlotte has appeared at my elbow in her purple jacket with a new braid and an orange-and-black tiger painted across one cheek, bright and slightly lopsided.

"I got a tiger," she says. "The lady said I could pick anything and everybody picks a butterfly."