The Cob Festival Whisper

Zara here, thirty-nine, and I'll get Aaron's age in there soon so nobody has to do math later. This happened last August at the Cob Festival in Mound City, Missouri, which is a real thing, I promise, and if you've never been, picture a county fair that decided corn was a personality.

Aaron and I had been together two years by then. We met at a tech conference in Kansas City when I was thirty-seven and he was forty-one (he's forty-three now), and we'd been steady ever since. Steady was the word I kept using that summer. Steady like a floor.

We'd come to Mound City for different reasons. I had a workshop there, three days of teaching logistics certification software to a room of people who'd rather be anywhere. Aaron came along because he's self-employed, an archaeological illustrator, which means he draws old dirt for a living, and he'd heard the festival had a craft row. He drew the whole drive there in a notebook while I drove and narrated the highway.

By mid-afternoon on Friday we were walking the stalls. Roasted maize smell everywhere, a bluegrass band hammering away on the wooden bandstand, kids running in packs between the legs of adults. Aaron bought a fried thing on a stick. I bought a lemonade as big as a fire extinguisher.

"You've got your trainer face on," he said, chewing. "The one where you're cataloging everybody's questions before they ask them."

"I don't have a trainer face."

"Babe, you have a face for everything. You have a grocery store face."

I did, probably. That was sort of the problem, and I wasn't ready to say it out loud yet. Somewhere between the kettle corn stand and the booth selling corn husk dolls, it had hit me that our weekends had gone from improvised to scheduled, that we'd stopped surprising each other somewhere back in the winter, and that the ease we were so proud of had started to feel like a comfortable cage. Not a bad cage. A nice cage. Cage with good light. But still.

He noticed me go quiet, because he always does.

"Okay," he said, "out with it."

"Nothing. It's hot."

"It's eighty-one degrees. Try again."

"I'm fine," I said, which was a lie, and he let it go, which was worse, because two years ago he wouldn't have.

Then he spotted the scooter rental booth. A little two-seat electric thing, the kind of golf cart that's had a shave and a haircut, with a hand-painted sign that said SEE THE OUTSKIRTS, $20 THE HOUR. Aaron loves any vehicle that isn't a car. He loves a ferry, a gondola, a rented paddle boat with a malfunctions sticker on it.

"Zara. Look at this thing."

"It's a death trap shaped like a shoe."

"It's freedom," he said, and paid the twenty before I could argue, because that's Aaron. The kid running the booth, maybe twenty-two, explained the throttle with the confidence of a man who had never personally ridden it. We climbed on, me behind Aaron with my arms around his middle, and putt-putted out of the fairground lot onto a gravel road that climbed toward the tree line.

For about four minutes it was genuinely nice. Wind, shade from the oaks, the festival noise dropping behind us. I was actually about to say something honest when the scooter coughed, hiccuped twice, and died.

We rolled to a stop halfway up the rise. Aaron got off, put his foot out like the ground might help, and said a soft curse under his breath, the polite kind he uses around strangers. Then he kicked the front tire once, not hard, just enough to register his feelings.

"That's a mechanical issue," I said.

"That's a betrayal, is what it is." He tried the ignition three more times. Nothing. He got out his phone, checked the little map, and sighed. "We're closer walking back than calling anyone. Kid's number is on the dash but he'll take an hour."

So we left the scooter leaning by a fence post, Aaron wrote SEE YOU, SORRY on the back of a receipt and wedged it under the seat, and we started down the gravel on foot. My boots were not broken in for gravel. Aaron walked on the uphill side of me like the road was going to attack.

The walk back took us along the edge of the fairgrounds, past the horse barn, past a row of booths I don't remember and one I do. It was a narrow stall with a folding table, and behind it an old man was grating nutmeg by hand into little paper envelopes. He had a row of graters on the table, most of them metal, and one wooden one off to the side, worn smooth, lined with tin.

Aaron stopped like the ground had grabbed him.

"Those are nutmeg graters," the man said, not looking up. "Grate your own, tastes better. Everybody knows that and nobody does it."

"How much for the wooden one?" Aaron said, picking it up. It was maybe five inches long, shaped like a fat fish, with a little tin grating strip set into the belly.

"That one? That one's old. Ten dollars, and I'm cheating myself."

Aaron handed over the money faster than he'd paid for the scooter. He turned it over in his hands the whole rest of the row, rubbing his thumb across the tin, and I watched him do it and felt something loosen in my chest. This was the man I'd met in Kansas City, the one who'd once spent forty minutes explaining a grinding stone to me in a museum basement while I fell in love with him. Somewhere along the way I'd started seeing the version of him that loads the dishwasher wrong and falls asleep during documentaries. It was good to see the other one again.

"Want to hold it?" he said.

"Sure."

The tin was cool under my fingers, worn at the edges, a little rough in the middle where years of nutmeg had scored it. We turned off the main path, behind the horse barn, where the crowd noise dropped to a mumble and the shade came down thick. There were empty stalls along the back, doors open, hay on the floor, nobody in them because the horses were all out in the paddock.

I stopped walking.

"Can I say the thing now?" I said. "The thing I lied about earlier?"

"That's the thing I've been waiting for, yeah."

"The festival is a lot. It's all a lot. Not bad-lot, just, I've been on display all week, teaching, smiling, answering the same question forty times, and then I get here and it's more people, more noise, more everything, and the only person I know how to be around it is you, and even that's been feeling..."

I stopped, because I didn't have the end of the sentence.

"Feeling like a routine," he said. "Yeah. I felt it too. I kept trying to think of a