Market Rhythm

I was wiping sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist for maybe the hundredth time that afternoon. The tent did nothing for heat. August in Oak Valley, and the fair committee had put the brewery booth right next to the generator, because of course they did.

The samples were going fine, at least. Small plastic cups, three beers on tap, a little sign that said two dollars, free if you buy a growler. My boss had gone off somewhere around two to talk to a guy about taproom flooring, which left me alone to pour and to scan the crowd every thirty seconds like an idiot.

I'd been doing that scan for about two hours. Rory said he'd come by around four. Rory was twenty-eight, an architect, and I had about four months of text messages from him saved on my phone that I probably should have deleted for my own dignity. We'd met on an app back in April. He sent the first message, something about my profile photo where I was holding a bucket of spent grain like it was a trophy.

"Dalton?" a voice said, and I turned around so fast I nearly knocked over the cider sample.

There he was. Taller than I'd guessed from pictures, which always messes with me. Short brown hair, sunburn across the nose, holding a mason jar of honey in one hand like it was a shield.

"Hey," I said. Real smooth. Real composed. "Hey."

"I brought you honey," he said. "The bee guy by the front gate gave me a deal because I bought three jars. So it's not weird. It's a bulk thing."

"It's not weird," I agreed, taking the jar. "Do I look how you expected?"

His eyes did a little pass over me, and I felt it, and I'm twenty-four years old so of course that affected me.

"Taller," he said. "And sweatier."

"That's the fair experience. It's included in the ticket price."

He laughed, and it was the same laugh I'd been hearing in text form for months, the little ha ha typed out with no punctuation, and suddenly it had a sound and I liked the sound. We shook hands. The shake went on about two seconds longer than a handshake needs to go on, and we were both aware of it, and neither of us fixed it.

"So," he said, letting go finally. "Pour me something. I've been reading your texts about brewing for four months. I feel like I've earned a taste."

"You have read exactly one text about brewing," I said. "The rest were you asking if hops are weeds."

"Are they not?"

I poured him the pale ale, the one we call Field Note, and he held it up to the light like he'd seen somebody do in a movie once.

"You don't have to do the swirl," I told him. "This isn't wine. You drink it."

"I'm evaluating."

"You're stalling because you're nervous."

He drank it. He made a face first, then a better face.

"Okay, that's good," he admitted. "That's actually good. Huh."

"You sound surprised."

"I've had your beer described to me in forty separate messages. It had a lot to live up to."

I had to flag down a couple of customers in there, a woman in a sun hat who wanted to know if the stout was gluten free, which it was not, and a guy who wanted to argue about whether IPAs were over. Rory waited through both, leaning on the table, watching me work, and I caught him doing it and he didn't look away when I caught him, which I noted.

"Walk with me," I said when the tent emptied out. "Marta's covering for me, she works the next tent over. She'll pretend to be mad that I left."

"Is that allowed?"

"Nothing at a county fair is allowed. That's the point of a county fair."

So we walked. Dust everywhere, the smell of fryer oil and livestock, generators humming behind every tent. He kept the honey jar thing going, pointing out that he could have gotten me jam instead and wondering aloud if he'd made the right call.

"Honey ages better," I said.

"Beer ages better."

"Okay, you've been listening."

We passed the fermentation display, which was actually just the winery club's setup, some plastic carboys and a folding table, but I got enthusiastic about it anyway because I'm incapable of not being enthusiastic about fermentation.

"See, that's a primary fermenter," I said, pointing. "Ours at the brewery are steel and about six times that size, but it's the same idea. Yeast eats sugar, gives you alcohol and CO2. It's the best deal in biology."

"You're doing the thing," he said.

"What thing?"

"The thing from your texts. Where you explain something and get faster and faster and then apologize for explaining."

"I don't apologize."

"You did. May ninth. About yeast. I have receipts."

"I'm not going to fight a man with receipts," I said, and he laughed again, that same laugh, and I was starting to understand that hearing it in person was going to be a problem for me. A good problem. A problem I'd been not-thinking about for a month.

We ended up over by the animal barns, where a goat-judging contest was happening in a small ring of hay bales. A woman in boots was walking a goat back and forth while a judge in a straw hat nodded like the goat was presenting a thesis.

"Okay," Rory said. "I need context. What is happening."

"He's judging the goat. Look at the goat's topline, the way it stands, all of it."

"The goat is winning?" he asked. "Is the goat winning?"

"The goat is doing great. Look at him."

The goat was indeed doing great. Rory watched with complete sincerity for a solid three minutes, asking questions, and I answered most of them wrong and he didn't care. At one point the winning goat's owner, a woman who looked about twenty-one, told us his name was Waffles, spelled Wafles on his halter, and Rory repeated "Waffles" about six times on the walk away like it was the funniest word in the language.

"I like you in person," he said suddenly, out of nowhere, while we were standing by the lemonade stand. "I was worried about that. Texts are easy. People are sometimes worse in person."

"Am I worse?"

"You're better. That's the annoying part."

"You're better too," I said. "I'd been building you up. Four months of build. You had a lot to live up to, same as the beer."

"And?"

"And you cleared it," I said. "Barely. The goat helped."

The lemonade was in a paper cup with a broken handle and cost four dollars, which I complained about the whole time I paid for it. He got one too. We stood there drinking and the sun started going down behind the exhibition hall and the string lights on the food tents came on all at once, and I don't know, something about string lights, man.

"So the fair closes at ten," he said, in the tone of a person who has rehearsed a sentence. "I'm camping behind the livestock barns. Vendor area. My firm does the fairgrounds master plan, so they gave me a spot to stay while I do site notes. It's a tent. It's a nice tent. There's a cot."

"Are you inviting me to your tent, Rory?"

"I'm inviting you to my tent, Dalton," he said, and then he took a breath. "If you want. Only if you want. You can say no and we do the fair and I drive home Sunday and we keep texting and it's fine."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Yes. I want to. I've wanted to since the handshake, honestly, but the tent also sounds nice."

He smiled down at his lemonade. "The handshake. Yeah. That went long."

"It went long."

"Good," he said. "Well. Good."

We found a picnic table near the pavilion, one of the old wooden ones with a wobbly leg and initials carved into it from people who were probably grandparents now. Rory sat across from me and set his lemonade down and did the thing where he squares his elbows up with the edge of the table like he's drafting it.

"Okay," he said. "Real question. Favorite style. Not what you brew. What you drink when nobody's watching."

"That's two different questions."

"I know. That's why I asked both."

I opened my mouth to answer and then I lost the whole answer because he reached for his lemonade and I watched his hands do it. He had architect hands, whatever that means, long fingers, a little pencil callus on the middle one I could see from across the table, and he wrapped them around the paper cup with the broken handle like the handle was fine, like he trusted it.

"Dalton."

"Sorry. What was the question."

"Favorite style. You just stopped talking in the middle of a sentence."

"Did I?"

"You said 'honestly it depends on the' and then you looked at my hands and stopped."

Oh, well, that was embarrassing. "I was looking at the lemonade," I said.

"You were looking at my hands."

"They were between me and the lemonade."

He laughed. That laugh again. "So what were you going to say it depends on?"

"Season. Honestly it depends on the season. Winter I want something dark, a stout or a porter, something you could stand a spoon in. Summer I want a pilsner, a real one, the kind that's dry and a little snappy. And in the weird in-between months I drink saisons because they don't belong to anybody."

"That was a whole answer."

"I'm a professional."

"Do you apologize for it?"

"Shut up."

He took a drink and set the cup down again and the hands thing happened again and I made myself look at the string lights instead. "What about you," I said. "You're not a beer guy, you said. So what's your drink."

"Bad answer. Whatever's cold. I like knowing what I'm drinking though. You've ruined me a little with the texts. I ordered a pilsner last week and thought about you explaining water chemistry."

"I never explained water chemistry."

"You did. June second. Sulfates versus chlorides. I retained maybe forty percent of it."

"That's a passing grade."

"Barely," he said, and smiled, and I looked at his hands again on purpose this time because at some point pretending had gotten stupid.

Marta texted me around then, you back soon?, and I texted back take twenty, and Rory raised an eyebrow at my phone. "You can go back, you know. I'm not going anywhere. I have a tent full of site notes."

"I'm not going back. Marta loves the booth. Marta loves being paid to stand next to a generator."

"You stand next to a generator all day?"

"It's always the generator next to my booth. I've worked next to that generator for two fairs now. I know its moods."

"Does it have moods?"

"It surges. When the fryer next door kicks on it surges and the tap flow gets weird and I have to say 'sorry, it's the generator' about forty times a day."

"That's your most repeated sentence at work."

"'Sorry, it's the generator' or 'the stout is not gluten free.' It's a race."

He laughed and finished his lemonade and crushed the cup a little, and his forearm did a thing, and okay, fine, I was gone, I had been gone since the handshake, and the sun kept going down behind the exhibition hall like it was doing it on purpose.

"It's getting darker," he said.

"I noticed."

"The crowd thins out after eight. People go home to their dogs and the fair gets quiet. It's actually my favorite part, when I'm out here doing site notes. You can hear the barns. Horses shifting around."

"That does sound good."

"There's a string of old bulbs out by my tent, the big round kind, on a wire between two poles. Somebody strung them years ago and now everybody just uses them. Picnic tables. It's quiet."

"You're selling it hard."

"I'm describing it accurately," he said. "The selling is a