Hop and Sway

The rope went with a crack you could feel in your teeth.

We'd spent three days stringing that main tent up. Three days of me on a ladder with my hop-stained fingernails and Ryosuke underneath me making bad jokes about belaying pins. And then the sky went the color of an old dish sponge and the wind came across the quarry flat like it had a grudge.

"Off the stage," Ryosuke yelled, which was funny, because neither of us was on the stage. We were under it. I was crawling out from behind the beer crates where I'd been stashing my vendor cash box, and he was holding a tarp over his head like that was going to do anything against the end of the world.

"Libby, move!"

"I'm moving, I'm moving."

Another rope snapped. I heard it whip past somewhere to my left and slap the wet grass. The canvas overhead started to sag, a big slow belly of green and white, drooping down toward us like something drunk. Rain came through the gap where the peak used to be. Not drizzle. Buckets.

We ran. Past the cider stall (Abe was already throwing everything under a plastic sheet, swearing in a way I won't repeat here), past the wildflower meadow where the poppies had all laid down flat like they knew something, toward the fence line at the edge of the site.

And there it was. The old steel water tower.

I'd been eyeing that thing all week. It's rusted half orange, half the original grey, with a narrow catwalk around the tank and a ladder bolted up the side that looks like it shouldn't hold anything heavier than a thought. Below it, in the shadow of the tank, there's this little patch of hops growing wild. Self-seeded, probably, from when somebody's grandmother grew them back when the quarry was still a quarry. Rainwater leaks out of the tank seams and feeds them. They were going mental this year. Twelve feet up the lattice, easy.

"Up there," Ryosuke said. He'd stopped running, hands on knees, forty-seven years old and breathing like a kettle. "That platform. It'll hold."

"Will it?"

"I've stood on worse."

"That's not reassuring, Ryo."

"It's not meant to be. Move."

The ladder was cold and slick and I hated every rung of it. My boots slipped twice. Ryosuke climbed below me, which I think was his idea of catching me if I fell, and mostly it meant I climbed faster just to get away from his commentary.

"Careful on the third rung, it wiggles."

"I KNOW it wiggles, I'm ON it."

"You've got great calves, by the way."

"Flatter later. Climbing now!"

The catwalk was about two feet wide, wet steel, and the wind hit it sideways. I got my arms around the tank wall and stood there like a starfish while the storm tried to peel me off. Ryosuke came up behind me and flattened next to me, and for a second we just stood there, two soaked idiots plastered to a rusted water tank in the Suffolk countryside, watching the main tent finally go.

It went slowly. Almost politely. The whole canopy slid off its poles on one side and folded into the mud like a dropped coat. Somebody down there screamed, but it sounded like the screaming of someone who is fine and just annoyed. I know that scream. I've made that scream. Abe made that scream about the cider stall ten minutes earlier.

"There goes my weekend," I said.

"There goes everybody's weekend."

"Three days. Three days of stringing that thing up."

"I know."

"You did the knots."

"I did the knots," he admitted. "The knots were good. The poles were not."

Then he laughed. And because I am a weak woman who has been quietly, stupidly happy for eight months, I laughed too, up there in the rain, with my face pressed against cold wet steel.

The tank has a kind of lip, an overhang where the old roof edge sticks out past the catwalk. We scooted along it, me first, until we hit the corner where the wind couldn't reach. Ryosuke sat down first, legs dangling over the edge like this was a park bench and not a drop onto iron railing. I sat next to him. My skirt was plastered to my thighs. My hair, which I'd actually done something with that morning, for the festival, for the customers, for no reason I'd admit to, was down my back in a wet black rope.

"This is the worst shelter I've ever hidden in," I said.

"Top three for me."

"Top three."

"There was a dumpster in Osaka. There was a bus shelter in Rotterdam. And this."

"Romantic."

"I never said romantic. I said top three."

That's the thing about Ryosuke. He always could make the disaster feel like part of the show. When we were together the first time, twenty-some years ago now, God, I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three and we were both broke and certain about everything except each other. He'd turn a flat tire into an evening. He'd turn a cancelled gig into a party on somebody's floor. And I loved it and I also, in the end, left it, because I got a proper job offer in another city and I was twenty-seven and hungry and I thought I wanted a life that didn't smell like van.

I did want it. I still got it. That's the part nobody tells you. You can want a thing and get the whole thing and it can be the right choice and it can still leave a mark shaped like a person.

Eight months ago he walked into my stall at a harvest fair, picked up a bag of my dried hops, and said, "These smell like my twenties." And I said, "Ryosuke. Put those down before you cry on them." And that was that. Eight months of this. Playful. Casual. Both of us saying casual a lot, the way people do when they mean something else.

The rain kept coming but up in the corner of the tank's shadow it was actually dry. Weirdly dry. The overhang did its job. Water poured off the roof edge in a curtain about four feet in front of us and we sat behind it as children behind a waterfall.

He dug in his coat pocket and pulled out a paperback. Soggy at one corner. The church cookbook.

"I was going to give you this at closing time," he said.

"The vicar's cookbook."

"The vicar's cookbook. Page forty-two. Plum cordial."

"Why?"

"Because it's yours. You're the only person I know who'd actually make it."

I took it from him. My hands were shaking a little from the cold. I turned to page forty-two and there was the recipe, in that brown old-people handwriting that church cookbooks always have, and a note in the margin in pencil that said double the sugar.

"Did you write that?"

"Me and about four other people, probably. It's communal knowledge."

I laughed again. Squeaky this time. Cold, and something else.

The curtain of rain went silver for a second when the lightning came, then black again. Down below us the hop patch was getting hammered flat, and I thought, poor things, they'll spring back, they always do, that's what hops are for.

"Libby." He said it quiet, under the rain. "Come here."

"Why?"

"Because you're shivering and I'm warm and it's not a line. Well. It's a little bit of a line."

I looked at him. Rain on his glasses, grey coming in at his temples that wasn't there when we were twenty-five. Still the same dumb patient face.

"Okay," I said, and moved over, and he put his arm around me, and that was where the night stopped being about weather.

He was warm, I'll give him that. And solid. Twenty years of carrying amps up stairs will do that to a man. I let my shoulder rest against his chest and told myself it was just for warmth. The rain told me to shut up.

"Flip to the front," he said.

"Why?"

"Trust me."

I flipped past the spine crack and the donation stickers and got to page one. And stopped.

Rhubarb pie. Granny Elsie's rhubarb pie. There it was, printed at the top of the whole book like they knew it was the best thing in it, and under the title, the contributor line in that same brown looping hand. E. Calloway, St. Mary's fete, 1987.

"That's her," I said. "That's my gran."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

"Because you talk about her when you're pruning. You talk to her, actually. I've heard you. You argue with her about the spacing."

I had no answer for that. It was true. I argue with a dead woman about row spacing on a regular basis and it keeps me sane, and apparently I do it in front of people. Fine.

"She sent in three recipes," I said, thumbing the page. "This one won. She told me about it. She was so smug about the rhubarb. She said the vicar's wife couldn't grow rhubarb to save her life and everyone knew it."

"Ruthless woman."

"Completely ruthless. She'd have flattened that vicar's wife in a competition and then brought her a jar of something afterward."

The lightning came again, further off this time. The thunder took a couple of seconds to follow, rolling out over the quarry flat like a barrel going down stairs. The storm was moving off. I could feel it going, that loosening in the air.

I looked at the handwriting a long time. It's a strange thing, seeing a dead person's handwriting in a soggy church book, sitting on a water tower, in the rain, next to a man you left twenty years ago and came back to eight months ago. There should be a word for it. There probably is in some language. Not English.

"I tried to bake this once," I said. "For you."

His arm stiffened slightly against my back. "The rhubarb pie?"

"Granny's recipe. You were on tour. You were coming back on a Thursday and I thought, I'll make the pie. I borrowed her book. I followed it exactly. Except."

"Except?"

"Except I didn't know you had to cook the rhubarb down first. I just. Put it in raw. With the sugar. It came out like gravel in wallpaper paste."

"Oh my God." He was laughing already. I felt it before I heard it, that rumble through his chest. "That pie. THAT pie. Libby, I ate two slices of that pie."

"You ate one and pretended."

"I ate one and told you it was interesting. Then I ate a second one out of loyalty. I had to lie down afterward."

"You never said anything!"

"You'd made me a pie. From your dead... from your gran's recipe. What was I going to say? 'This is a crime'?" He wiped his glasses on the hem of his shirt, which did nothing, because everything was wet. "I remember thinking, this woman will fight a war for me someday, because nobody puts that much effort into something that bad without serious commitment."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Your gran would have known in one bite. She'd have taken the fork away from me."

"She would have. She'd have taken the fork and the plate and told me I was wasting good fruit." I closed the book on my finger, keeping page one. "She'd have liked you, actually. That was always the annoying part. I knew she'd like you."

"You never introduced us."

"Because I knew she'd like you, and then it would be real, and then I'd have to figure out what we were." I said it before I could stop myself. The rain covered for me for a second, hammering on the tank above us. "Anyway. She died two years after I moved. I never got the recipe right. Never got anything right, really. The pie was a bad omen."

"It wasn't an omen. It was a pie."

"It was gravel in paste, Ryosuke."

"Okay, it was gravel in paste." He took the book from me gently and turned it over in his hands, water dripping off the corner that was already ruined. "But you tried. You tried to build a thing out of a recipe and a Thursday and a person coming home. That's the part I kept, you know. Not the pie. The trying."

I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything to say that