Tasting Lessons

Fair week again. Same dust, same funnel cakes, same horses. I've been hauling trailers to county fairs since I was twenty-one, and I'm twenty-four now, so that's three summers of the same thing. You'd think I'd be bored of it.

I'm not. But this year I wanted something new.

Not for the fair. For Ester.

We got married two years ago. Met her at the livestock auction when I was twenty-two and she was twenty-three, and she was there buying a half-share of a steer for the bakery she works at. I liked her laugh before I liked anything else. Two years later, still like it.

Here's the part I'll just say plain, because dancing around it wastes everybody's time. I wanted to share her. Or share a night with her, anyway. One night, one friend, all three of us. The thing sitting in my chest all week like a stone I kept turning over.

And Ester, God bless her, had hinted at it herself. Once. Late, in the dark, half asleep, she'd said, "What would it even be like, if somebody watched us?"

Then she'd gone pink in the morning and pretended she never said it. But I heard it. I kept it.

The friend I had in mind was Bertha Castro. She ran the jam and preserve stand two aisles over from the horse barns. She's thirty-two, single, loud in the good way, and she'd been on the fair circuit as long as I had. We'd flirted exactly once, at a rodeo afterparty three years back, before I was married. It went nowhere and we both knew it. That was the nice thing about Bertha. Nothing was ever heavy with her.

So Friday afternoon I walked Ester down the midway toward the jam stand. She had flour on her wrist still, from the morning's cinnamon rolls. Little details stick with me.

Bertha spotted us from ten feet out. She was stacking peach jars and she lit up.

"Well, look who it is. The handsome horse man and his better half."

"Hey, Bertha!" I leaned on her counter. "Smells like a whole orchard crashed in here."

"That's the peach jam, smart guy. You want a taste?"

"Always."

She handed us each a little wooden spoon. Ester dipped hers, tried it, made a happy noise.

"Oh, that's dangerous," Ester said.

"Right? I put a splash of bourbon in this batch." Bertha wiped her hands on her apron. "How's the horse business?"

"Won a blue ribbon Thursday," I said.

"On Buttercup? That sweet old mare?" Bertha laughed. "That's like winning a staring contest against a fence post."

"She's a good mare," I said, and Ester patted my arm like I was defending family honor, which maybe I was.

We chatted a while. Weather. A vendor two rows over who'd gotten caught selling honey that was mostly corn syrup. Small stuff. But the whole time, the stone in my chest was turning. Say it. Don't say it. Say it.

Ester was licking the last of the jam off her spoon when I decided. Then un-decided. Then Bertha looked right at me, like she could read my face the way she read fruit at the market.

"You've got something on your mind, Silas Ward. I've watched you mope around these fairgrounds for three years and you never once got this face."

"What face?"

"The thinking-about-it face." She pointed the spoon at me. "Spit it out."

Ester looked at me too. Two of them. Great.

I took a breath. "Okay. So. Don't answer right away, either of you. Just hear it."

Bertha crossed her arms, grinning. "This is already my favorite conversation of the week."

"Bertha. Ester. What if, sometime, the three of us. You know." I waved a hand like that explained anything. "Spent an evening together."

"Together how?" Ester asked. Her voice was small but she wasn't running.

"You know. Together."

Bertha's eyebrows went up. Then down. Then up again. "Huh."

"Say we're joking," Ester said quickly. "So we can laugh and I can die of embarrassment."

"We're not joking," I said. "Unless you want it to be."

There was a long stretch where a kid at the next stall was yelling about pigs and I've never been more grateful for background noise.

Bertha spoke first. "Can I ask a question before anybody blushes harder?"

"Please," Ester said.

"Is this your idea, Silas, or hers? Because they're very different things and I'd like to know which."

I looked at Ester. She was staring at the peach jars like they'd answer for her. Her ears were red. But she wasn't saying no. She was doing that thing she does, where her mouth works sideways before she talks.

"It was mine," I said. "Mostly. But she said a thing once. In the dark. About wanting somebody to watch us."

"Silas!" Ester's whole face went red now. "That was private."

"It was, honey. I'm sorry. I just didn't want Bertha thinking I was dragging you into this."

Bertha put both hands flat on the counter like she was settling a market dispute. "Okay. Okay. First, nobody's dragging anybody. Second, Ester, breathe, because nobody here thinks you're weird. Third." She paused. "Third is I'm flattered as hell and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wondered."

"Wondered what?" Ester asked, quiet.

"What you two get up to in that trailer. You two radiate. It's honestly a little rude to the single vendors."

Ester made a sound halfway between a laugh and a squeak. "Bertha!"

"I'm serious. You two hold hands like it's brand new every time. It's disgusting and adorable."

I laughed. The stone in my chest got lighter.

"Alright," Bertha said. "Real talk. Nobody decides anything standing at a jam counter. Ester, sweetheart, what's your honest gut? Not your church upbringing gut. Your gut gut."

Ester was quiet a second. She turned her spoon over in her fingers.

"I don't know," she said. "I've only ever been with Silas. I was raised to think all of this was..." She stopped. "But I've thought about it. More than once. Since before I said the thing he apparently kept."

"She kept it too," I said. "Good sign."

"Shut up, Silas." But she was smiling a little. "I think. Maybe. If it was Bertha. And if it was slow. And if I could say stop."

"You can always say stop," Bertha said, and her voice went gentle in a way I hadn't heard from her before. "Anytime, for any reason, mid-sentence even. That's the deal or there's no deal. Same for him. Same for me."

"That's the deal," I said.

Bertha looked between us. "And what about you two? This doesn't blow up your marriage, me being in the middle of it?"

"That's kind of the point," I said. "We want to see what's out there. Together. Not apart."

"That's either the sweetest or the craziest thing I've heard at this fair, and I once heard a man bid four hundred dollars for a goat he thought was a sheep."

"That's a good motto for us, actually," Ester said, and we all cracked up.

"So," Bertha said. "Not tonight. I've got jam till nine and you two have that mare to fuss over. Saturday night. The fair closes at ten, the midway empties by eleven, and I've got a camper parked behind my stand with a real bed and a door that locks."

"You live in a camper?" I asked.

"There's always been a camper. Where do you think the jam sleeps?"

Ester looked at me. I looked at her. Something passed between us, the same something that was there at the auction when she bought that steer and I asked her out and she said yes before I finished the sentence.

"Saturday," Ester said. "If I don't chicken out."

"You won't," Bertha said. "And if you do, we'll eat jam and play cards and never speak of it. That's also a deal."

She handed Ester a jar of the peach bourbon stuff.

"On the house. For courage."

We walked back toward the barns. Ester held my hand tight the whole way and didn't say a word until we got to Buttercup's stall.

"Silas?"

"Yeah, honey?"

"I'm scared."

"I know."

"But the good scared." She squeezed my hand. "The roller coaster scared."

I kissed the flour off her wrist. Saturday felt a long way off and also way too soon.

* * *

Saturday took its sweet time. I groomed Buttercup three times for no reason. I swept a stall that was already clean. Ester sold cinnamon rolls at the bakery booth until six, and I walked past it four separate occasions pretending I needed funnel cake.

The fourth time she caught me.

"You've bought three funnel cakes, Silas."

"I like funnel cake."

"You hate powdered sugar. You told me it's dust with ambition."

Fair point. I carried the thing back to the trailer and fed chunks of it to a goat that looked like it had made some bad decisions.

Then it was ten o'clock and the lights on the midway started shutting down in sections, like somebody was erasing the fair from the back forward. The Tilt-A-Whirl went dark. The announcer thanked everybody for coming out. Vendors dropped their shutters and counted their drawers.

We found Bertha stacking jars into a crate, sleeves rolled up, hair coming loose from her braid.

"Look who's here," she said. "Right on schedule."

"We said we'd come," Ester said. Her voice was steady. Her hand in mine was not.

"And I said I'd be here. Bertha Castro, woman of her word." She latched the crate. "Give me two minutes to do the clasp and we're out of here. I've been smelling peach bourbon for eleven hours. If I smell it one more minute I'll start drinking the stock."

We walked while she locked up. Past the midway, past the exhibit hall with its canned goods behind glass, past the rabbit barn where somebody had left a fan running for the animals. The noise fell off behind us a piece at a time. By the time we cleared the last row of livestock barns, the only sounds were our boots on gravel and the hum of the generator line and, somewhere far off, a night watchman's radio playing something with a fiddle in it.

Bertha led us around behind her jam stand to a little yard of trampled grass between two big live oaks, out of sight of the midway. Somebody had dragged a couple of pallets back there years ago and somebody else had never bothered to haul them off. She sat down on one like she owned it. Which, fair circuit rules, she probably did.

"Okay," she said. "Nobody's here but us and the manure lagoon, and the manure lagoon is not talking."

Ester laughed. Actually laughed, full voice, and I felt something in my chest come loose.

"So how does this even work?" Ester asked. She sat on the other pallet. I stayed standing, mostly because my knees felt interesting. "Do we just. I mean. There's no manual for this."

"There's no manual for anything worth doing," Bertha said. "But if you want a rule: we go slow, and everything gets asked first. No surprises. That's the whole game."

"No surprises," Ester repeated, like she was memorizing it.

"Also I should confess something." Bertha pulled the braid loose all the way and shook her hair out. "I've been rehearsing this conversation in my head since Friday afternoon and none of my rehearsals ended with me being eloquent. So I'm just going to say the true thing, which is that you've got the prettiest mouth I've seen in three summers of county fairs, and I would very much like to kiss it. If you'd like that too."

Ester looked at me. Not asking permission. More like checking I was still real.

"He's here," she said, half to Bertha, half to herself. "He's going to watch."

"If he's okay with that," Bertha said. "Silas?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that's the whole point." My voice cracked on point and I heard it and kept going anyway. "That's the point."

"Okay then." Bertha turned back to Ester and held out her hand, palm up. "Come here whenever you're ready. Not a second before."

Ester looked at that open hand for a second. Three seconds. Five. Then she took it and let Bertha pull her up off the pallet and close the distance between them.

The first kiss was nothing like I expected and everything like I'd hoped. It was soft. Careful. Bertha's hand came up and cupped Ester's jaw, thumb resting on her cheek, and Ester made this small sound into her mouth, a surprised little hum, like she'd opened a door expecting a wall and found a garden.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets watching my wife kiss another woman ten feet from a swine barn, and I have never in my life been so proud of anything.

They broke apart. Ester's eyes were wide.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's. That's different."

"Different good or different bad?" Bertha asked.

"Different soft." Ester touched her own lower lip like she was checking it was still there. "Silas kisses me like he means it. You kiss like you've got all night to mean it."

"That's the jam vendor advantage. Patience. You can't rush a preserve, it turns to sugar mush." Bertha grinned. "Can I do it again?"

"Please," Ester said, and then went pink at how fast she said it.

The second kiss was longer. Bertha's other hand settled at Ester's waist, just resting there, and Ester's hands did this hovering thing, like birds deciding where to land, and finally landed on Bertha's shoulders. I watched Ester's mouth open