Snow in the Ginger

The divorce papers came through in March, nine months ago now, and I still haven't figured out what to do with the cabinet where my coffee mugs used to be. Tabby, twenty-seven years old, court transcriptionist, sitting on a Tuesday night with the snow piling up against my kitchen window like the sky was emptying its pockets over our little street. My ex, Darius, got the good mugs in the settlement, which was fine, because he also got the good years, or at least the ones I thought were good. Married at twenty-two, divorced at twenty-seven, no kids, no big scars, just this low hum of empty where somebody used to sit.

So when the ginger fair in Kurobe rolled around, the one that takes over the old fairgrounds every winter for two days, I said yes before I even thought about it. My friend Delia was supposed to go with me, but she got called in to cover a shift at the hospital, and rather than stay home listening to the radiator knock, I put on my boots and walked the three blocks through the snow to Maurice's place.

Maurice is my neighbor, three doors down, thirty-five years old, and he does something with money that takes him a full minute to explain every time somebody asks. Equity indexed annuity interest rate derivative consultant, which I have transcribed out loud once and never again. He's quiet, keeps his blinds half closed, shovels his walk before dawn so nobody sees him doing it. We've exchanged casseroles and borrowed ladders and that's about the whole friendship, but he's the only person on the street I'd knock on a door for in a snowstorm.

"Maurice, open up, I'm freezing and you're coming with me to the fair," I said when he answered.

He looked at me over his glasses, hair pushed sideways like he'd been running his hand through it at his laptop all afternoon. "The fair starts in an hour, Tabby. I have a report due."

"The report can be due tomorrow too. It's snowing. The whole point of the fair is to stand around in warm halls eating ginger things while it snows at you." I pushed past him, because I had already decided, and he knew me well enough by now to just grab his coat.

And that is how we ended up walking into the fairgrounds together as the snow came down fat and slow, the main hall glowing ahead of us like a lantern, all these stalls and tasting counters steaming in the cold. There were people everywhere, vendors calling out about candied ginger and ginger cider and some kind of ginger paste that I did not trust, and the smell of the whole place was warm and sharp and sweet at the same time.

* * *

We had barely made it past the ticket gate when a man in a puffy gray coat came bearing down on us like he had been lying in wait, and he was pointing at Maurice with a grin I did not like the shape of.

"Maurice, you old ghost. I heard you left the firm. Nobody could tell me where you went, and you know how I hate not knowing things." The guy stuck out his hand, and Maurice shook it with the enthusiasm of a man being frisked.

"Greg. Yes, I moved on a while back. Good to see you."

"Oh, come on, that's all I get? What have you been doing, who are you seeing, are you still a hermit?" Greg's eyes landed on me and stayed there, bright with nosiness. "Well, well. And who is this?"

I will be honest about how it happened, which is that it did not happen on purpose, it just came out of my mouth on its own like a sneeze.

"I'm his girlfriend," I said, and hooked my arm through Maurice's, and Greg's eyebrows went up like two caterpillars celebrating.

Maurice made a small sound, half a cough, and then, to his enormous credit, rolled with it. "Tabby. Yes. We've, um, been seeing each other a little while now."

"Seeing each other." Greg looked between us like he was checking math. "Well, that's the best news I've had all day. Maurice finally got himself caught." And he went on and on about people from the old firm, and I nodded along and squeezed Maurice's arm whenever Greg looked doubtful, and Greg eventually wandered off toward the cider stall with a promise to tell everyone he ran into us.

There was a silence after that, the two of us standing in the crowd, my arm still looped through his because taking it away felt like it would admit something.

"Well," Maurice said finally. "That was thorough."

"I panicked. You looked like a man being interrogated, so I improvised." I let go of his arm, slow, and put my hands in my pockets. "We can find Greg and tell him it was a joke. Or, we could just, you know, be fake for an afternoon. It's not like he's going to call your office and verify."

Maurice looked at me the way he looks at interest rate spreadsheets, like he's working out whether the numbers hold. "A fake afternoon," he said. "All right. But I'm buying you the first thing you eat, because apparently I'm a boyfriend now and boyfriends have obligations."

* * *

So we walked the fair. That's the short version. The longer version is that he bought me a paper cone of ginger brittle, and I made him taste it even though he claimed to be "more of a savory person," and he ate three pieces. We tried a ginger cider at the big brass counter in the middle of the hall, standing shoulder to shoulder while a vendor with a mustache like a paintbrush ladled it steaming into cups, and Maurice held my cup too while I dug in my pocket for tokens, which was a small thing that did a small unhelpful thing to my chest.

We tried the ginger fudge, which was too sweet. We skipped the ginger paste, which we both agreed looked like it belonged in a toolbox. There was a stall with little ginger shortbread pressed into snowflake shapes, and Maurice bought a box of those, and when I raised my eyebrow at him he said, "For my mother," so fast that I knew it was a lie and he knew I knew, and we both kept quiet about it.

Somewhere in there, in the press of people near the tasting counters, his hand found mine. Not grabbed it, just arrived next to it, and then around it, casual as anything, and my heart did a thing I refuse to describe in detail because I was twenty-seven years old and not new at this, but I had honestly forgotten what it felt like to be held onto in a crowd.

"You don't have to do that," I said, quietly, over the noise.

"It's for authenticity purposes. Greg could still be anywhere." He said it looking straight ahead at a stall of dried ginger wreaths, very serious, as a man reading a legal disclaimer.

"Right. Authenticity."

"Also," and here his voice dropped, and he turned his head so it was just for me, "I'd rather this not become a story on the street. People talk. If word gets back to anyone from my work that I'm dating my neighbor, I'll spend a month explaining things I don't want to explain. So when we leave here, if we're stopping being fake, we stop clean. Okay?"

"Okay," I said, and meant it the way you mean things when your hand is still inside somebody's hand.

The snow picked up outside the tall windows of the main hall, big slow flakes coming down under the floodlights, and inside it was all steam and noise and the smell of warm sugar, and we had one more day of fair left and one box of shortbread that was definitely not for his mother.

"Come on," I said, pulling him toward the far stalls. "Fake boyfriends carry the bags."

The far stalls turned out to be the best ones anyway. There was a woman selling carved ginger roots that looked like little animals, and a man with a whole table of antique kitchen things, and it was the antique table that got me, because sitting on it between a copper grater and a box of old measuring spoons was a magnifying glass with a silver handle, tarnished dark, with a lens that had a crack running through it like a river on a map.

"How much?" I asked, and the man said a number that was barely anything, and I dug out tokens before Maurice could reach for his own.

"You know that's broken," he said, watching me hold it up to the light.

"That's why it was cheap. And the crack looks like lightning, look." I held it so he could see, the split in the glass catching the fair lights, and he leaned in, and for a second we were both looking through the same cracked lens at nothing in particular. "Also it's silver. Real silver, feel the weight of it."

He took it and turned it over in his big square hands, which looked faintly ridiculous holding a lady's magnifying glass, and I didn't tell him that because it was funnier unsaid.

"Where would you even use that?"

"At work, obviously. I transcribe depositions, sometimes the exhibits are tiny. Little signatures, little stamps. This is practically a business expense." I took it back and put it in my coat pocket, where it clinked against my token pouch, and I was weirdly pleased with it, the way you get pleased with a thing that cost less than lunch and shouldn't matter and does.

Maurice bought a copper grater from the same table, which he claimed was for his kitchen and which I suspected was also a lie, and then we drifted toward the back of the hall where a wide staircase went up along the wall, wooden steps worn pale in the middle, and a sign said GALLERY, SEATING, VIEWING.

"Let's see if the view is anything," I said, and he followed me up without arguing, which by then I had learned was his way of saying yes to most things.

* * *

The gallery was a balcony that ran along three sides of the hall, mostly empty because everyone downstairs was eating, with a few benches against the railing and a radiator ticking along the wall doing its honest best. Below us the whole fair spread out, all the booths and the brass counter and the crowd moving in slow currents, and beyond that the tall windows, and beyond those the courtyard, where the snow had kept coming down all afternoon until the lamplit ground was soft and blue-white and the stalls out there wore hats of it.

"Oh," I said, because it was genuinely pretty, and I don't hand out oh's cheap.

"Yeah," Maurice said, and stood next to me at the rail with his forearms on it, and we watched the snow come down through the floodlights in the courtyard, big unhurried flakes, the kind that look like they're not in any rush to land.

I got the magnifying glass out of my pocket without really deciding to, just to hold it, and ran my thumb over the crack in the lens.

"Beautiful but broken," Maurice said, looking at it more than at the courtyard. "It suits you."

I turned my head and looked at him. He was watching the snow with a perfectly straight face, the absolute menace.

"Excuse me?"

"It's a compliment," he said, still not looking at me. "Beautiful but broken. Things that have survived something are worth more. Ask any collector."

"You just called me broken at a ginger fair."

"Collectors pay extra for the crack," he said. "The perfect ones are a dime a dozen. Nobody writes home about a flawless lens." And then he finally looked at me, and his face held something that wasn't the joke anymore, and it sat there for a second before he looked back at the snow, and I put the glass away and said nothing because my chest was doing the unhelpful thing again and I needed a minute.

We leaned on the rail a while longer. Downstairs a man was demonstrating some kind of ginger grating contraption to a crowd of eight, and they all applauded when it worked, which honestly felt right. The radiator ticked. My feet hurt in my boots, which I mention because it was the only thing wrong with the whole hour.

"What time does it shut down?" I asked.

"Announcement said eight. It's about quarter to now, I think."

"So we've got, what, the tail end of day one."

"Day one of two," he said. "You're counting too."

"I'm not."

"You asked what time it shut down."

"That's just planning. Anyone plans." I bumped his shoulder with mine, which I had started doing and could not seem to stop. "Delia's going to text me any minute asking how the fake boyfriend is going, by the way. She's been at the hospital all day and she's living vicariously."

"Delia is the one who told you I shovel before dawn."

"She is, and she was right, and you do. I've seen you. Five in the morning, big coat, little shovel. It's the most respectable thing on our whole street."

"It's efficient," he said. "Snow compacts. You get up early once, the whole week is easier."

"You're the only person alive who describes shoveling as efficiency." And he laughed, actually laughed, a short surprised sound like it had gotten out before he could review it, and I decided right then that I would be collecting more of those over the one remaining day of the fair, for research purposes.

The announcement came over the speakers at eight exactly, a woman's voice telling everyone the hall would close in fifteen minutes, thank you for coming, the fair reopens at ten, and the crowd downstairs began its slow drift toward the doors, and the noise