The Fair Day Recipe

The fair smells like fried dough and manure, which is about right for Silver Creek. I'd dropped off my honey ale for the beverage tent at nine, killed two hours walking the midway, and come back to the judging tables in the cloverleaf park just as the pie crowd showed up.

That's where I saw him.

Sebastian Rosen, thirty-four years old, standing over a sour cherry pie like it was a patient he wasn't sure would make it. Same dark hair, same hunched shoulders. He'd put on some weight in the face, the good kind. He was wearing an apron over a collared shirt, which was very him.

"Sebastian! Hey!"

He turned, scanned the crowd, found me, and did this little wave. Not a hey-there wave. A shy wave, fingers only, like he wasn't sure it was him I was hollering at.

I pushed through the pie people and hugged him before he could decide whether to wave again. He smelled like cedar and something sweet, probably cherry juice.

"Harriet Allbright," he said into my shoulder. "No way!"

"Way. What are the odds. You bake now?"

"I bake one pie. Once a year. This is it." He stepped back and looked me over. "You look good. Strong."

"That's the brewing. I lift sacks of grain for a living now. You still doing the pharmacy thing?"

"Night shift, ten years running. I'm basically a vampire who counts pills."

"That tracks. You always did your best work after midnight."

He laughed, and something in my chest unclenched a little. It had been a while since somebody laughed at my old jokes like they were still good.

We got coffee from the church stand and found a bench at the edge of the grass. The judge at the pie table was poking entries with a fork like he was mad at them.

"So how's life," I said. "Married? Kids? Secret second family in the next valley?"

"None of the above. Single about a year now. You?"

"Broke up with Otis two months ago."

"Sorry. Two months is still fresh."

"It's fine. He wasn't bad, he was just... final. You know? Like the last day of a job you didn't love anyway." I shrugged. "He moved out on a Tuesday and I bought a new fermenter that same Friday. Everybody grieves different."

"That's very healthy of you."

"I'm extremely healthy. I'm a rock." I sipped the church coffee, which was terrible. "So a year, huh? What happened?"

"She wanted Denver. I wanted here. That's the whole story, really." He turned his cup around in his hands. "What about you? How'd you end up brewing in a town with four stop signs?"

"Uncle Walt left me his barn. I turned it into a taproom and now I can't leave. It's got me."

A kid ran past chasing a dog, and we both watched him go.

"Remember when we thought we'd both end up in the city," Sebastian said. "Big careers. Fancy apartments."

"Remember when I thought I'd use my chemistry degree for something besides beer?"

"You use it for beer."

"I use it for beer. Better beer, though."

* * *

They announced the pie winners at three. Sebastian got second, and his face when they called his name was worth the price of admission. He accepted a red ribbon like it was a live grenade.

"Second place," he said, coming off the stage. "Grandma would've been furious. She never took second in her life."

"Show me the recipe. I don't believe your grandmother had a secret pie identity."

He dug in his pocket and came out with a recipe card, soft at the corners, handwritten in faded blue ink. Flour dust in the paper. I took it careful, like it might crumble.

Sour Cherry Pie. Adele Rosen. And under it, in that slanted old handwriting, the crust instructions: Cold hands. Don't rush it.

The ink was worn smooth right where a thumb would sit. Somebody had touched this card a thousand times.

"I know this handwriting," I said, and my throat went tight on me. "Sebastian, I know this handwriting. She used to pin it inside the cabinet door so it wouldn't get lost."

The summer we were both twenty-two, the summer after our last year, I'd lived at his grandmother's place for three months. Cheap rent for watching the house while she stayed at her sister's on the coast. Sebastian came up most weekends. We baked our way through that entire card box, ruined four pies, ate three good ones, and never once said out loud what we were to each other. Then school started and life happened, and we'd traded a message every year or two for the last decade, and that was it.

"She gave it to me when she moved to the home," he said. "Told me if I was going to keep making it, I'd better do it right."

"You make it right?"

"I make it second place."

"Grandma would allow it. Second, from a boy. She'd take that." I traced the faded letters with one finger, cold hands, don't rush it, and I could hear her voice saying it, standing behind me with a dish towel over her shoulder. "God. That was a good summer."

"It was," he said. Quiet. He was looking at the card, not at me, but he wasn't really looking at the card either.

I handed it back and he put it in his pocket like it was a wallet.

"Where are you parked?" he asked.

"Truck's at the trailhead lot."

"Walk with me. I want to show you something, if you've got time."

"I've got nothing but time. It's Saturday and my fermenters are doing the work."

He led me down off the fairground, past the church stand, down the main street to a narrow shop front with PIANO RESTORATION stenciled on the window in gold. I'd walked past that place a hundred times and never once gone in.

"You work here?"

"Two years now. Part time, days. Nights I do the pharmacy. I sleep on Sundays and nobody believes me." He unlocked the door and pushed it open. "Come see."

Inside it smelled like varnish and resin and old wood, a smell that hit me somewhere deep and stayed. An upright piano sat on the big workbench in the middle of the room, opened up like surgery, all its guts laid out and gleaming.

"This is what I do on my days off from my other job," he said. "Which is insane, I know. But look at her. Nineteen twenty-one. Somebody was going to burn her for firewood."

I ran my hand along the case. The wood was smooth as a cheek.

"Sebastian. This is beautiful. You did this?"

"Tuning and a couple of hammers still to go. But yeah. Mostly me." He touched one key and the note hung in the dusty air, clear and a little sad. "You want to hear something?"

"Play."

He played maybe eight bars of something slow, then stopped, embarrassed. "Rusty."

"That wasn't rusty. That was good. Don't fish."

The door clicked shut behind us. We'd never fully closed it, and now it was closed, and the shop felt suddenly small and warm and private, the light going amber through the front window.

I don't know who moved first. I'd like to say I