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"Because of you."

"Yes," I say, looking at her mother. "I think that's correct."

"I hate both of you," says Rosemary, and she's laughing again, and her eyes are bright, and the world narrows to a plaid collar and a mouth I know the taste of.

It takes two more hours to reach the mill booth. Dolores sits at a folding table heaped with blue throws, wrapped in one herself, a coffee can of cash at her elbow and her reading glasses on their chain.

People drift past and touch the wool and she says forty-eight dollars without looking up. When I stop in front of her she looks up.

"Mr. Caldwell."

"I'd like to buy a blanket."

"Forty-eight dollars."

I hand her two hundred and tell her to keep the change. She looks at the bills, then at me, then drops them in the coffee can with the unhurried precision of a woman who has never been fooled, and I take the throw, which is heavy and soft and smells like cedar and rain. She folds her hands over the coffee can.

"Sit down a minute."

I sit on a hay bale. Behind her the Green is a river of laughter, the band doing something unfortunate to a Beatles song. Dolores doesn't look at it. She looks at her own knuckles, thick and knotted, the hands that made a bushing to a thousandth of an inch.

"I'm sixty-two," she says. "My knees are done. My husband has asked me to quit every winter since 2019 and I tell him next year. I stay for the girls." She nods at the floor, the booth, the town. "If somebody told me I could go home with a decent package and the girls would keep their jobs, I'd sign before you finished the sentence."

"Ms. Pike—"

"I'd want to come in on Fridays. Train somebody. Somebody good, somebody young, who'd treat those machines like they're alive." Her eyes are hard and wet. "The Drapers don't run on prayer, whatever that Whitcomb said. They run on whoever loves them."

"I'm not going to ask you to do that."

"You didn't ask. I offered." She tilts her head. "That's the whole difference, Mr. Caldwell. It's the only difference that matters in this town."

I look at the wool in my lap. I look at the hay bales and the paper lanterns, and I look at Rosey across the Green in the gazebo, wiping whipped cream off her wrist with a napkin, telling someone something that makes them laugh.

"I'll tell her it was my idea," I say.

"You'll do nothing of the kind. You'll tell her the truth. She's too proud to ask me and too stubborn to let me volunteer, so you'll find a way to make both of us feel like we thought of it." Dolores picks the coffee can up and weighs it in her hand. "You're better at that than you think."

I cross the Green. It's not a decision exactly, it's a settling, the way a loom settles once you've found the right thread.

I stop at the gazebo steps and Rosemary turns with the napkin still in her hand and the pie table behind her. One look at my face and the napkin falls.

"I need more throws from the storeroom," she says, abruptly. "You can carry."

We walk the five minutes to the mill by the river road. The maples are shedding in earnest and the leaves swirl across the path in gold gusts. The mill is dark and silent on a Saturday, no thrum, no steam, and without it the building looks like a sleeping animal.

We go in through the barn store past a college kid at the register who doesn't look up from his phone, and through a plank door at the back into a long, cool room with a high window and slanting light.

The cider press stands in the middle, a hulking iron thing with a wooden bed, sticky with the sweet smell of pulp. Shelves of mulling spices line one wall. Cinnamon, clove, orange peel, star anise, in neat muslin sachets, and the air is so thick with them I can taste it. Wool bales are stacked against the other wall like soft bricks. The door falls closed behind us. It's the first quiet we've had all day.

"Rosemary," I say.

"Not yet." She's at the shelf with her back to me, her hands braced on a stack of folded throws. "Say it where I can't see your face. I can't think when you do the thing with your face."

"I'm not going to send the list."

Her hands go still on the wool.

"Give me until Sunday night. I'll find the money another way or I'll be out. Dolores—" I stop. I can hear my own voice and it's not smooth. "I'll find it. I'm not sending thirty-eight names to a board on Monday morning. I counted heads, Rosey. My father counted faces and my whole career has been a reaction to it, and I never once did both."