The Hop Ties

The fairgrounds came into view right around the bend where Highway 12 dips past the water tower, and I felt my shoulders drop about two inches, which for me is basically a spiritual experience.

I hadn't been back in two years. Two years of law school finals, then bar prep, then a job at a firm in Seattle where I billed my life in six-minute increments and got praised for never letting them see me sweat. Control was the whole job. Control the narrative, control the client, control your own face when opposing counsel says something stupid. I was good at it. I was so good at it that sometimes I forgot what my own unclenched hand looked like.

Then my dad called in July and said, "You know the juggling contest's still got your name on the trophy, right? Except they actually engrave new names now, so maybe come defend it," and I booked the Friday off before I even thought about it.

The Granger hop farm sat just past the fairgrounds, and I could see the drying barn from the road, the oast with its peaked roof that I'd climbed about a thousand times before I turned twenty-two and left for the city. Harvest was starting up. There were guys on the pickers already, and the whole valley smelled like hops, green and a little bit like beer that hadn't happened yet.

I pulled my rental Corolla into the fairgrounds lot at 4:40 on a Friday afternoon, which gave me twenty minutes to register before the table closed. I grabbed my bag of clubs from the trunk. Yes, I brought my own clubs. I fly with them. The TSA people in Seattle know me now. That's a thing that happens when you're twenty-four and you refuse to check a bag that contains your good clubs.

And that's when I saw him.

There was a guy at the back of a pickup unloading a juggling set, and I knew the shoulders before I knew the face. Rashid Armstrong. He had a box of rings and was setting them down real careful on the tailgate, and he was bigger than I remembered, or maybe just filling out differently at twenty-six than he was at twenty-four.

Here's a thing I don't say out loud much. Two years ago, during harvest, after the end-of-season party at the Grange hall, Rashid and I went back to his truck and then eventually to his apartment above the pharmacy, and we had exactly one night together, and it was good, and then I left for Seattle the next morning and we never talked about it. Not once. Not a text, not a hey at Christmas. I just folded it up and put it away the way I fold everything away.

He looked up and saw me and did not drop the box of rings, which I respected.

"Well, if it isn't the three-time champ," he called out.

"Four-time," I said, walking over. "You were there for two of them, don't play dumb."

"Nellie Granger." He set the box down and wiped his hand on his jeans before offering it, which was such a pharmacist thing to do that I almost laughed. I shook it. His hand was warm and the shake lasted maybe a half second too long, and we both noticed, and neither of us mentioned it.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. "Last I heard you were doing night shift in Spokane."

"Moved back two years ago. I run the pharmacy on Alder Street now, nights mostly." He nodded at the box. "And apparently I'm competing Saturday. Been practicing in the break room between refills."

"You're going down, just so you know."

"Oh, I'm counting on it!" He grinned, and it was the same grin, and my stomach did a thing I did not authorize it to do.

"Three clubs, five balls, and clubs-versus-rings for the final," he said. "You still got the shower trick?"

"I retired the shower trick."

"That's a shame. That shower trick won you a trophy when we were..."

"Twenty-one," I said, maybe too fast. "It won me a trophy."

"Uh-huh." He picked up the rings again, not looking at me, but there was something in his face, some agreement that we both remembered the same night and were going to be adults about it, which frankly I did not trust either of us to manage.

I carried my bag to the registration table, which was set up under a pop-up canopy near the exhibition hall, and there was a woman named Raine behind it who had run fair registration since before I was born, or at least it felt that way.

"Granger, Nellie, juggling, open division," I said.

"Oh, honey, we got a situation," Raine said, pulling out a clipboard. "You're the third person this month with a booking problem. The Cedar Rest Motel double-booked the fair block. Some conference from Yakima came in and took half the rooms. You got a reservation?"

"I do. Under Granger."

"You had a reservation. They moved folks around and yours got bumped to next Tuesday, which is no good for you, I expect."

I stood there for a second doing the lawyer thing in my head, running through remedies, none of which applied to a sixty-year-old woman with a clipboard and no liability.

"It's fine, Raine. I'll sleep at the farm."

"You could," Raine said, "but your daddy told me this morning you were staying in town so you could get to the hall early Saturday. He said it, not me."

Of course he did.

"I've got a room," Rashid said, coming up behind me with his rings. "Two beds. I heard the whole thing, the acoustics by this canopy are terrible. I mean, they're good, unfortunately."

"You don't have to do that," I said.

"Neighborly thing. Besides, if we're sharing a wall, you can't secretly practice at midnight and show up fresh while I've been up all night listening to you be great at something."

"That is exactly what I would do."

"I know." He shrugged. "Room 6, Cedar Rest. I'll be there around nine. You can take whichever bed you want, they're both lumpy."

Raine wrote something on her clipboard with the deep satisfaction of a woman watching a small town function correctly. "There, settled. Y'all sign here and here, contest is at ten sharp Saturday, exhibition hall, no fire props indoors, we had the incident in 2019."

I signed. Rashid signed under me, his handwriting still doing that slanted pharmacist thing where the letters look like a prescription.

"See you at nine," he said, and picked up his rings, and walked back toward his truck, and I watched him go for slightly longer than a rival would watch a rival.

* * *

The Cedar Rest Motel sat at the edge of town where Alder meets the county road, a single story of brown doors with orange numbers, the ice machine humming like it had something to prove. I got there at five to nine, changed out of my driving clothes in the bathroom of the farm first, told my dad I had a room in town, and watched him do a very bad job of hiding that he'd already heard about it from Raine.

Room 6's door was open when I walked up. Rashid was sitting on the end of one bed in jeans and a gray shirt, and the room smelled like the pine air freshener somebody had plugged into the wall in about 2004. Two beds, a nightstand between them, a TV bolted to a cabinet.

"There's a working ice machine," he said, "and a nonworking ice machine, and I have already determined which is which so you don't have to suffer."

"You're very generous."

"I know." He gestured at the far bed. "That one's further from the door, which means safer, which means yours, I assume, given the profession."

I set my bag down and sat on my bed, and we looked at each other across about four feet of motel carpet, and the room got quiet in that particular way rooms get quiet when two people have history and are both pretending they don't.

"So," he said. "Saturday."

"So Saturday."

"You really think you're gonna beat me?"

I picked a club out of my bag and balanced it on my finger. "Rashid, I have spent two years being paid to win arguments. You spend your nights counting pills. You do the math."

He laughed, and lay back on his bed with his hands behind his head, and I caught myself looking at him doing it and made myself stop.

"Oh, I brought the good stuff," he said. "Wait till you see my five-ball pattern. I've been workshopping it in a break room next to a fax machine like some kind of artist."

"A visionary, even."

"A visionary," he agreed.

Outside, somebody at the fairgrounds was testing the PA system, a long feedback whine and then a voice saying testing, one, two, and cutting out. It was going to be a long night in a small room, and tomorrow we were going to stand in front of the whole county and compete, and I was twenty-four years old and had never once in my life let go of anything on purpose.

I kicked off my shoes and tried not to think about the fact that the last time I'd been alone in a room with Rashid Armstrong, I hadn't been thinking much at all.

He sat up and reached under his bed, which turned out to hold a paper sack with a bottle of whiskey in it, the kind with a screw cap that comes from a gas station and doesn't pretend otherwise. "Brought this from the pharmacy Christmas party leftovers. It's been in my trunk since December, which is either a warning or a selling point."

"That's a selling point," I said, and got up to dig two of the motel's plastic cups out of the bathroom, the wrapped ones, because unwrapped cups in a motel are a gamble I don't take even with my own history in the room. I sat back down on my bed facing him and he poured, and the whiskey smelled like a campfire that had been put out with more whiskey.

"To the contest," he said.

"To you losing the contest."

"To me losing the contest," he agreed, and we drank, and it was bad, and we each had one more splash of it and called it done, and he screwed the cap back on and put the bottle in the sack.

The PA outside did its feedback whine again and quit. A dog somewhere started up and stopped. He rolled the ice bucket across the carpet to me with his foot, which was either friendly or an opening move, and I decided not to decide yet.

"So be honest," he said, tipping his cup at my bag. "Two years in Seattle, big firm, all that. You still got it? Or do you just have the trophies and the memory of having it?"

I stood up, because there are two answers to that and only one of them is a demonstration. "Rashid Armstrong. Are you challenging me to a juggling duel in a motel room with a nine-foot ceiling?"

"I'm challenging you to a juggling duel in a motel room with a nine-foot ceiling, yes. Loser buys breakfast."

"Waffles at the diner, the good kind, with the side of gravy," I said, because if I was going to lose on purpose I was going to make it expensive, and then I thought about what I'd just admitted to myself and took a drink instead of saying anything.

"I accept and I'm scared," he said, and got up, and we pushed the nightstand against the wall and he moved the TV cabinet back with one shove and suddenly there was a clear rectangle of ugly carpet and we were standing on opposite ends of it like it was a mat.

I went first, five balls, which is showing off, and I knew it was showing off, and I did it anyway, and for about forty seconds the room was nothing but the sound of them, that hollow plastic tick, tick, tick on the down beats, and he stood there with his arms crossed watching me with an expression I remembered from harvest, from a porch, from a long time ago, and I kept the pattern alive partly out of pride and partly because while I was looking at the balls I didn't have to look at him looking at me.

"Okay," he said when I caught the last one. "Okay. That's rude. That's just rude."

"Five balls, clean, in a motel room. Your move."

He picked up his rings and did a thing with them I genuinely did not know he could do, a column flash where the outside rings went over the top of each other in a roll, and I hated how good it was, and I told him so.

"That's new since you left," he said, catching them.

"Everything's new since I left, apparently. When did you learn that?"

"Two winters ago. Night shift gets slow. I'd juggle in the aisles between restocking, two in the morning, fluorescent lights, nobody to see." He set the rings down. "Except the security camera, which has footage of me dropping a ring on my own face eleven times before I got it."

"I would pay money for that footage."

"You can't afford it."

We traded back and forth for a while, clubs now, him matching my reverse cascade with one of his own, and the one cup of whiskey was doing what bad whiskey does, which is make the room smaller and warmer and make both of us funnier than we were, and at some point we had drifted from opposite ends of the carpet to standing about three feet apart, throwing across the gap at each other, one set of clubs shared between two people, which is a thing