Page 20

I do not get a hot dog. I cross Main in my boots and my flannel with my heart going like a kid's, past the barber pole and the bank, into the drugstore.

The bell rings over the door. I walk down the family planning aisle as if I have a right to be there. The box is on the second shelf. I read the back as if it contains a plot. I carry it to the register, where the woman behind the counter taught my Sunday school class in 1999.

She doesn't blink. She rings it up like a loaf of bread, puts it in a paper bag, folds the top over twice, and hands it across.

"Beautiful day for it," she says.

I don't know what she means. I know exactly what she means. I say, "Thank you, Mrs. Hadley," and make it to the door with my dignity almost intact. I walk back across the Green with a paper bag under my arm and my whole body humming like a Draper at full speed, and I know that I've decided. I haven't told anyone, including myself. I just bought the box.

By six the sun's sliding behind the church steeple and the sky has gone the color of a peach.

A man with a long lighter works his way along the gazebo rail, and the paper lanterns catch one after another, until the whole Green glows amber and gold. The band has packed up and someone's put on a fiddle.

The smell of woodsmoke thickens, and across the grass by the river the bonfire's going up, a great crackling pile of pallets and dead branches with kids already gathering, all of them with sticks and bags of marshmallows. The cold comes up out of the ground and I pull my cardigan tight.

"Mom!"

Charlotte hits me at a dead run, her tiger smeared to something closer to a raccoon, her braid half out, a stuffed felt pumpkin clamped under one arm. She smells like kettle corn and woodsmoke. "Grandma's here. She said I can bring the pumpkin. Can I bring the pumpkin?"

"You can bring the pumpkin."

"And my pajamas are already in the car, the blue ones, not the ones with the hole." She pulls back, squints up at me with her father's eyes in her face. "You look weird."

"I look the same."

"You look pink."

"It's the bonfire."

"We're not at the bonfire."

"Charlotte."

"Okay." She shrugs, the verdict of a girl who has decided not to push her luck. Her gaze slides past my shoulder and her whole expression changes, and I don't have to turn around to know who's standing behind me.

He's got a blue throw over one arm, the one from Dolores's booth, folded neat, and he's holding it the way you'd hold a hat in church. He stops a respectful six feet away.

"Do you like cinnamon rolls?" Charlotte asks him.

"I do. Very much."

"My grandma's are the best. She lets me do the icing." She considers him for a long, level moment, then with the generosity of a nine-year-old giving away something she isn't sure she can spare, adds, "You can have one tomorrow. If there's extras."

"I'd be honored."

"Okay." She nods. "Don't forget to eat dinner, Mom. Bye." She hugs me hard around the middle and then she's gone, a flash of purple across the grass to the curb where my mother's Buick sits idling. The passenger window slides down. My mother, in her good wool coat, looks at me over the rims of her glasses. She doesn't look at Roman at all, which is worse.

"Take your time in the morning," says Lorraine, perfectly innocent, and rolls the window back up.

I want to lie down on the Green.

The Buick pulls away. The taillights go around the corner and the noise of the fiddle fills the space where she was.

Beside me Roman hasn't moved, and I hear him breathe in as if he's about to say something and decide against it. The bonfire flares, a shower of sparks goes up with a cheer, and in the light I can see him very clearly: straw on his shirt, a streak of soot on his jaw, and his eyes on my face, patient, asking nothing.

I take the throw out of his arms, shake it out, and put it around my shoulders. It's heavy and soft and smells like cedar and the dye house. It's exactly the weight I didn't know I needed.

"Forty-eight dollars," I say.