Pie and Prejudice

I moved to Lark's Hollow in the spring of the year I turned forty-two, which is the kind of sentence I would have hated saying out loud back when I was pouring twenty-dollar glasses of pinot for people in Portland who pretended to taste things they couldn't. Kyla, forty-two, sommelier, recently retired from high-end restaurant work, single by choice and mostly happy about it. I gave myself that whole pitch when I signed the lease on a converted storefront across from a feed store, because apparently burnout makes you romantic about small towns. The wine bar didn't have a sign yet, just my name on a permit and about sixty boxes of inventory stacked in the middle of the floor like a fort I was too old to build.

I was unpacking those boxes on a Tuesday morning when I first saw her, except I did not know it was a her, so let's be honest with ourselves and say him for now, because that's how it went in my head. Across the street, in front of the feed store, this person in a faded denim work shirt was lifting fifty-pound bags of something, feed, seed, I don't actually know what's in a feed bag, and stacking them on a hand truck with this easy rolling grace, like the bags were cooperating. Broad shoulders, forearms, a jaw under a ball cap, and a way of standing that made my brain go quiet for a second, which is a bad sign in a person who plans to live quietly. I stood there holding a box of Riesling and watched him work and thought, well, that's a problem I don't need, and then I kept watching anyway. I don't remember how long. A while. Long enough that a bag tore and I felt personally embarrassed about the spilled grain.

I told myself it was just town novelty. In Portland I had seen beautiful people the way you see weather, constantly and without comment, and here I was getting flustered over a guy in work denim hauling chicken feed. It was the move, I decided. New place, no friends, no routine, and my brain was casting around for anything to be interested in, and it had picked this. Fine. A little crush, harmless, the kind you don't even act on, and in a town this size I would probably never even talk to him, or I'd talk to him once and it would deflate, the way these things do.

That theory lasted until dinner, because the only diner in town is called The Bramble, and Kenji runs it. Kenji is forty-one, came here when he was twenty-eight to take over his uncle's place, and he was the first person in Lark's Hollow to treat me like a resident instead of a tourist, so I ate there probably four nights a week while my kitchen was still boxes. He has this habit of leaning on the counter when it's slow and asking questions like he's taking my order for my whole life.

"So," he said, sliding me a coffee I hadn't asked for, "how's the bar coming."

"Boxes," I said. "Many boxes. I found a bottle of grappa from the previous tenant hidden behind a wall panel, which felt like a message from God or a warning."

He laughed at that, and then he got this look, this specific little smile, and I should have known right then. "You know," he said, "if you want to meet people, the church fair's coming up. Everybody's going to be there. Abi's running it again."

"Who's Abi?"

"You've seen her, probably. She runs the feed store."

I want to point out that I heard the word her. My ears received the word her, fully and completely, and my brain, which is allegedly an adult brain belonging to a forty-two-year-old woman, filed it under not important and moved on, because I had already built this whole picture around a him. That's what I mean about committing to the mistake. It wasn't that nobody told me. It's that I had a crush going and I did not want the paperwork of reexamining it, so I just kept the picture.

"The feed store guy," I said. "Tall, shoulders, works like he's in a slow movie about strength."

"That's her," Kenji said, and he was grinning now, clearly enjoying something I wasn't in on. "Abi. Runs the store herself. Her grandfather's place, she's had it since, what, her late twenties. She organizes the fair, she judges the pie contest, she fixes half the roofs in town. You'll like her."

"Sure," I said, which meant no, I had decided I liked the version of this person I had invented, and the real one sounded like homework.

* * *

I broke down and went into the feed store that Thursday, officially because I wanted to ask about the smell, because my bar's vent system shared an alley with the feed store's loading area and on hot days the whole back room smelled like hay and molasses, which is a great smell for a barn and a weird smell for a bar. Unofficially, and I knew it was unofficial, I wanted to see him again, and the plan was to be charming for ninety seconds and leave with my dignity.

He was behind the counter doing something with a clipboard, and up close it was worse, because he had this warmth to him, this settled quality, like a person who has never once wondered whether the room wants him in it. I launched into my story about the vent and the molasses and somewhere in there he looked up and gave me his full attention, and his eyes did something, they were knowing, is the only word, like he was already three steps ahead of whatever I thought I was doing, and his voice came out warm and low, an alto, a rich settled alto, and every alarm in my body went off at once.

"I'd say trap it in," he was saying. "The molasses. Some places pay good money to smell like that."

"Right," I said. "Good. Trapping it. That's, yeah." I had planned sentences. I had prepared, in the car, actual charming sentences about wine and small towns, and instead I was standing there repeating words like a parrot with a head injury. He smiled at me and it wasn't a smirk, it was a real smile, patient, and I thanked him and left, and on the sidewalk outside I stood there for a good minute trying to figure out what had just happened to my voice, which had gone up half an octave in the store without my permission.

At dinner that night Kenji watched me eat my burger with the expression of a man watching a car slowly roll into a ditch. "So you met Abi," he said.

"Is that what that was," I said, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the pie case.

* * *

The church fair took over the town square in June, and I went partly for research, because I figured half my future customers would be there, and partly because by then I had stopped lying to myself about anything except the one big thing. The square was all folding tables and bunting and a stage where a man was tuning a guitar, and I made a slow circuit, and then I saw the pie booth.

She was behind it in the same denim, sleeves rolled, and there were pies laid out on the table like she'd graded them, and I walked over before my brain could file an objection. I had learned two things by then, from Kenji, obliquely, over weeks of me pretending not to ask. Her name was Abi. She was forty-four. Everything else I had somehow kept in the wrong column, because I am stubborn and because wanting something makes people stupid, I have a wine theory about this actually, that desire is just bad bookkeeping, you stop recording the entries that don't fit.

"What's good," I asked, and she looked up, and it was the same knowing smile from the feed store, like we had both agreed not to mention that scene.

"The strawberry rhubarb, if you're serious. The peach if you're nostalgic. The marionberry if you want to be impressed by somebody's grandmother's recipe." Her voice was that warm alto again and this time I just let it happen, let it wash over me, standing there in the sun like a person with no dignity.

"I'm always serious about fruit," I said. "I spent twenty years telling people what to drink with dessert. It's basically the same job."

"Oh yeah, you're the wine girl," she said it easily, no mockery in it, and handed me the strawberry rhubarb in a paper bag. "Four dollars. Welcome to town, by the way, everybody's talking about the bar."

"Everybody should mind their business," I said, digging for cash, and she laughed, and God, the laugh. "Thank you, sir," I said, and I heard it come out of my mouth, the sir, heard it the way you hear a glass chime wrong, and I stood there frozen with my four dollars half extended.

She didn't correct me. She took the money, and her hand brushed mine, on purpose or not I still don't know, and she said, "Enjoy the pie," in that alto, and there was a whole sentence inside how she said it, some paragraph I wasn't ready to read yet, and I walked away with a warm pie in a paper bag and my heart doing things I don't want to describe in a public square, church property, no less.

I ate the whole pie that night standing at my counter, no plate, and I texted Kenji, who replied with a single question mark, and I turned my phone face down and sat there thinking about a smile, and a voice, and the fact that I still, at that point, had the columns wrong.

Kenji gave me three days of mercy, which for him was a record, and then on Sunday morning he called and said, come in before the church crowd, I'm making coffee and you look as if you've been eating pie alone in the dark, which was accurate enough that I put on real pants and walked over. The Bramble at eight in the morning was empty except for the smell of bacon and the radio playing something country, and he set a mug in front of me without asking what I wanted, because after four nights a week for months he knew my order better than I did.

We talked about nothing for a while, the bar, the permit, whether I'd found a sign painter, and then he wiped the counter in front of me for longer than a