The Farmer Takes Her

The county fair came around every July like a bill you forgot you owed, and every year I swore I'd skip it, and every year I went anyway. This year I almost didn't. I'd been divorced for two years by then, twenty-nine years old, living alone in a townhouse with a mortgage that felt like a punishment, and the thought of wandering around a fairground full of happy families made my chest tight in a way I didn't enjoy. But my secretary, Noor, had basically shoved the flyer at me on Friday and said I needed to get out of the office before I started arguing with the photocopier again, and she was right, which was annoying. So on Saturday afternoon I put on a sundress I hadn't worn since before the wedding, which should tell you something, and drove out to the fairgrounds on the edge of town.

Parking was the usual disaster. I ended up in a gravel lot behind the 4-H barns, wedged between a dually pickup and a horse trailer, and I walked the quarter mile in with dust on my sandals and already sweating through the dress. Mid-July in this part of the state is no joke. The air smelled like funnel cake and manure and sunscreen, and somewhere a PA system was crackling out announcements about the pie contest at four o'clock. I bought a lemonade I didn't even want, just to have something to do with my hands, and started drifting.

I don't know why I went toward the livestock barns first. I'm a lawyer. I went to a good law school, I bill two hundred an hour, and my idea of livestock is the neighbor's yappy dog. But the barns are where the shade is, and the shade is where I wanted to be, so I ducked into the long open-sided building where the beef cattle were stabled, all that sawdust and fan noise, and that's where I saw him.

Joseph. Standing at the rail of a pen, talking to some kid in a future farmers jacket about a heifer, of all things. He was forty-five by then, I knew that much from birthday texts we'd exchanged every year for going on six years, and he wore it well. Tall, broad through the shoulders the way you get from actual work instead of a gym, forearms that looked like they belonged on a different man entirely. He had his hat pushed back and his sleeves rolled up and I stood there like an idiot with my lemonade sweating in my hand, watching him talk to that kid, and something in my stomach did a slow roll I hadn't felt in a long time.

Here's the background, and I'll get through it fast. Joseph and I met in law school, six years ago now, when I was twenty-three and he was a year behind me at thirty-nine, an older guy who'd come back for the degree after a stint doing something I never fully pinned down and a marriage that had ended long before I met him. We flirted for two whole years. Real flirting, the kind with a current in it. And then his father had a stroke and he left school at forty to take over the family farm, and I finished, and we kept in touch the way old friends do, Christmas cards and the occasional beer when his truck brought him through town. I married another lawyer at twenty-six, divorced him at twenty-seven, and through all of it Joseph stayed this fixed point in my life, this friend I'd never kissed and never stopped thinking about kissing. That's the truth of it. Six years of a thing neither of us ever named.

He looked up from the pen and saw me and his whole face changed. Not dramatically. Just a settling, like something he'd been bracing for had finally arrived.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said, and came down the aisle with his hand out. "Reba Cole. What are you doing in a barn?"

"Looking for shade and a personality transplant, in that order." I shook his hand. His palm was warm and rough and I held on maybe a half second longer than the situation required, and I'm not sure either of us missed that. "What are you doing here? You're not exactly the 4-H demographic."

"I'm the 4-H demographic," he said, offended in a fake way. "I sponsor the steer class every year. That kid's grandfather showed here, his dad showed here, now he's showing. Somebody's gotta keep the lights on."

"Somebody's gotta. Sure." I took a sip of lemonade. It was too sweet. Everything at the fair is too sweet. "How's the farm?"

"Alive. Which is the same as thriving, if you squint." He looked at me a beat longer than was strictly polite, taking in the dress, the hair, whatever the divorce had left behind in my face. "You look good. You look like somebody who's been sleeping."

"Wow, thanks!"

"No, I mean it. Last time I saw you, at the courthouse thing two springs ago, you looked like you were running on batteries. Now you look like a person."

I laughed, and it came out easier than I expected. Joseph could say something that should've stung and it just landed like a hand on your shoulder. "I've been sleeping," I admitted. "Alone, in a bed that only I sweat in. It's an improvement over the previous arrangement, believe me."

"I heard, you know. About the divorce. I didn't want to be the guy who texts 'sorry about your marriage,' so I sent nothing, which I've since decided was wrong."

"You sent a card. Halloween of that year. It said, and I quote, 'hope your pumpkins are heavy.'"

He grinned, that slow crooked grin I'd been carrying around in my head since I was twenty-three, and I felt twenty-three again, standing in a hallway outside contracts class with my heart doing something undignified. "I stand by that card. It was sincere."

"It was insane. It was perfect." I finished the lemonade and wished I hadn't, because now my hands were empty and I had no excuse to keep standing there being looked at. "Walk with me? I've been here forty minutes and all I've done is look at cows."

"Best thing here to look at," he said, and then, without meaning to say it out loud, apparently, "present company aside," and we both pretended he hadn't, and I filed it away like an exhibit.

We walked the barns and then out into the mid-afternoon glare, past the rides where some spinning contraption was flinging people around and making them scream, past the row of food trucks where the grease smell hits you like a wall. He bought a bag of kettle corn without asking if I wanted any and handed it over like of course I wanted some, and I did, and we ate it walking and it got dust on it and I ate it anyway.

We talked about law school, which we always do, and it was better this time because the divorce has burned off a lot of my old self-consciousness and I just told the stories the way I remembered them. The professor who called me "young lady" for an entire semester because he refused to learn names. The time Joseph got kicked out of the moot courtroom for laughing, actually physically escorted, over a witness's answer that I will not repeat here but involved a cousin and a jet ski. He reenacted the laugh, right there between the food trucks, and I laughed until my sides hurt and a woman selling roasted corn gave us a look.

"Six years," he said, when we'd caught our breath. "That's how long I've known you. That's longer than you were married."

"Longer than I knew my ex-husband, my current husband, and my future husband combined, probably."

"Future husband," he repeated, and his voice held a quality I chose not to examine while standing next to a roasted corn truck. "You have somebody in mind for that position?"

The fair was loud around us. Kids screaming at the Tilt-A-Whirl. The PA reminding everyone about the pie contest at four. And me, twenty-nine years old, with a bag of kettle corn going stale in my hand, realizing that the window I'd been pretending was permanently open had maybe started to close, and that I was tired of pretending.

"Maybe I do," I said. "Ask me again somewhere quieter."

* * *

He didn't ask right away, which was the right move and also drove me half crazy. We did the full fair. He judged, informally and loudly, the rabbit exhibits. I made him ride the Ferris wheel with me even though he claimed, at forty-five years old, that he no longer trusted carnival engineering, which turned out to be a lie because he wasn't scared at all, he just liked looking at the whole valley laid out flat and gold under the sun. We sat at the top of the wheel in the little swinging seat, our knees touching, and he pointed out his land, way off past the tree line. You could just see the orchard, his favorite corner of it, a green smudge.

"That's where my truck is," he said.

"Is that a fact."

"Staying late tonight. Fireworks end the fair at ten. Grounds'll empty out after." He was looking straight ahead at the horizon, not at me, giving me all the room in the world to not understand him. "You could come see the orchard. Cornfield's right behind it. Nobody out there but the crickets."

I looked at his profile against the sky. Six years I'd been circling this man. Two years of flirting, four of Christmas cards, one marriage that was mine, and still circling. My mouth was dry and my heart was behaving itself for once and I said, real calm, like I was reading a case caption out loud, "I'll bring the kettle corn."

The seat swung a little. Somewhere below us the Tilt-A-Whirl screamed again. He finally turned his head and looked at me, and whatever was in my face must have answered the question in his, because he nodded once, slow, and looked back at the horizon, and we rode the rest of the way down in a silence that had a current in it, the old current, the one from the hallway outside contracts, and I thought, well. Well, well.

The rest of the fair we spent like two people who had agreed on something without agreeing on anything. He walked a half step behind me through the livestock barns again because he wanted to check on the steer class entries one last time before the judging wrapped, and I stood there watching him talk to a kid in a green 4-H shirt about feed weights, and I thought about how many times I had stood somewhere watching Joseph talk to somebody, six years of it, county fairs and courthouse lobbies and one memorable funeral, and how the watching had always been the whole relationship. The looking. The birthday texts every year, his in September, mine in March, ten words apiece, and how those ten words had carried more weight than any conversation I'd had with my ex-husband in the last year of that marriage.

That is a thing you are not supposed to think about a man who is not your husband while you are still married, and I had thought it anyway, and filed it, the way I file everything, and now the file was open on the desk and I couldn't close it.

The pie contest came and went at four o'clock and we did not go. He bought me a lemonade I didn't ask for and I drank the whole thing, and somewhere in there his hand found the small of my back, just resting there between my shoulder blades while we stood at the fence watching somebody's border collie herd ducks through an obstacle course, of all things, and neither of us said a word about the hand. It stayed. I let it stay. The sun was dropping and the light went that heavy amber color it gets in July and the whole fairground looked like a photograph somebody had over-warmed in editing, and I remember thinking very clearly, this is the last afternoon I will ever be only his friend, and feeling no grief about it at all, which surprised me.

I'd expected grief. I'd expected the divorce to have left me skittish, and it had left me skittish about a lot of things, about my townhouse with its mortgage and its empty second bedroom, about Noor's careful face every time she booked me a solo deposition. But not about this. About this I felt as though I had been holding my breath since law school and had finally, at twenty-nine, remembered that breathing was an option.

We ended up sitting on a hay bale behind the sheep barn, of all the romantic places in the world, because my feet were killing me in the sandals I'd worn, the sundress ones, the ones I hadn't put on since before my wedding, and Joseph said I should sit and then sat next to me close enough that our shoulders touched. The fair was thinning out. Families with tired kids. The PA droning. Somewhere a man was arguing about a weight guess at the guess-your-weight