Cranberry Shift

I am forty-four years old, and I have been single for three years, which if you do the math means the last time anybody touched me on purpose was right around the time my relationship with Jamie wound down all polite and bloodless, the way a kettle goes quiet after you pull it off the burner. We didn't fight. We just stopped. And since then I have been on eleven first dates, maybe twelve, I stopped counting after the one with the man who explained cryptocurrency to me for two hours at a Swiss Chalet, and not one of them has gone anywhere.

So there I was at the annual Bog Bake-Off, standing in the steam of forty-odd pies at the Cranberry Bistro, holding a judging scorecard I did not need because I wasn't a judge, I was the accountant for the co-op and I had come because the board figured somebody from the office should show a face. The place was packed. Everybody from the valley was there, contestants in aprons, the little trophy table, Leon Metcalf working the mic for the charity auction portion of the evening the way he does, all that rolling auctioneer rhythm in his voice making people laugh and bid more than they meant to.

And none of it did a thing for me. That's the part that gets me looking back. A room full of warm people and warm pies and cranberry everything, and I stood by the wall with a glass of tap water thinking about my dead vibrators at home, the batteries gone soft in the drawer, and how I keep meaning to buy new ones and keep not doing it, because buying them means admitting I'm the woman who buys batteries for that, alone, on a Tuesday. Forty-four, healthy, decent looking if I say so myself, and dry as a shed.

Leon is thirty-eight, six years younger than me, and I have known him since the co-op hired him to auction off surplus harvest equipment two falls ago. He cooks part-time at the bistro and auctions the rest of the year, and he has this habit of teasing me in that measured sing-song cadence, going, going, gone, like I'm a lot he's working up to a final price. I like it more than I probably should. Anyway.

* * *

The judging wrapped around ten and the crowd drained out fast, the way rural crowds do, everybody with a drive or a ferry to catch. I said my good nights to the board ladies and walked out into the mud lot, and my Corolla clicked and clicked and did absolutely nothing else. Dead battery, or worse, I don't know cars. I sat in the driver's seat and tried it four times, then got out and stood there in my nice work shoes sinking a little into the bog-side muck, and that's when Leon came out the kitchen door with a garbage bag over his shoulder.

"Well," he said, and looked at my car, and looked at me. "That's a no from the judges!"

We both laughed at that, harder than it deserved, the kind of tired laugh you get at the end of a long event day. His truck was blocked in behind two delivery vans that had come for the pastry order and parked like they owned the lot, so we were both stuck, and the joke of it was almost comfortable. He said he'd give me a boost in the morning, no rush, and I said fine, and then I remembered the ferry. Last ferry to the other side of the passage leaves at ten forty-five in the summer schedule and eleven in the off season, and it was pushing eleven by then.

He rummaged in the bistro's lost-and-found bin by the coat hooks and came up with two rubber boots that did not match, one green and one black, and offered them over with a little bow like he was presenting prizes. They were both too big for me but better than my work shoes in that lot, so I wore them, one clomping higher than the other, and we walked the quarter mile down to the ferry slip together in the cold dark, boots squelching, the water black and flat and smelling faintly of bog.

The slip was empty. The dock lights were off. The schedule board on the post had been updated with a laminated sheet sometime that fall, and the eleven o'clock crossing was gone from it, last run at ten fifteen now. We stood there a minute reading it twice each, like it might change.

"Okay," Leon said finally, "so we're bivouacking at the bistro. There's coffee, there's a break room with a decent couch, and there are, I want to say, nine leftover pies I am legally obligated to throw away in the morning."

So we walked back. And I want to note here that nothing about the walk felt like a setup. It felt like two tired adults accepting a lousy hand, that's all. He locked the front door behind us out of habit and then we had the whole place, the kitchen still smelling like baked cranberry and pastry and a hundred people's evening, all to ourselves.

He made coffee in the big commercial machine, real coffee, not the burned stuff from the air pot, and we took our mugs back to the staff break room, which has a couch older than both of us, a table with a wobble in one leg, and a bulletin board covered in schedules and a photo of somebody's dog. We sat on opposite ends of the couch with our feet up on the wobbly table, boots off, and he told me about the worst entries in Bake-Off history.

There was the year somebody entered a cranberry chowder that set off the smoke alarm at the tasting table. There was the man, and Leon swore this was true, who submitted a pie with a live lobster baked into it on purpose, as a statement. There was the woman who won three years running and it turned out she was buying the crusts wholesale from a bakery in Halifax, and the scandal of it, the way the committee met for two hours over store-bought crust, Leon