The Lyre and the Hat

So here's how it starts, or how I remember it starting anyway, because honestly some of that weekend has gone soft in my head and other parts are sharp as a hatpin.

My name is Dinah Phlox, I'm twenty-eight, and for most of my adult life I have been what people at the farmers market call a good girl, which I used to think was a compliment until I realized it mostly means nobody expects anything from you. Good girl Dinah, they'd say, her felt brims are always even, her stitches are always tidy, she always pays her stall fee on the first day, and I'd stand there smiling like that was a life. I dated a fellow art student when I was twenty-two, a nice boy named Sebastian, and it ended the way a cup of tea ends, lukewarm and forgotten, and since then my most exciting relationship has been with a steam steamer I named Geoffrey.

And then this spring, right around when the daffodils came up crooked along the market wall, I woke up one Tuesday and thought, I am bored clean through. I was sitting at my worktable with a lovely, safe, sensible cloche in my hands, sage green, small ribbon, the kind of hat that sells to ladies who say things like "oh, that's practical," and I swear the hat looked bored too. So I did something I hadn't done since I was twenty-two and reckless with other people's opinions. I went into my back room and I started cutting feathers.

The annual hat-making championship was six weeks out, held every year at the Santo Tirso Farmers Market in the old walled garden ruin behind the produce stalls, and every year I had entered something safe and every year Carlton Leeds, the head judge, had given me third place and a little certificate and a handshake. Carlton is thirty-four, married to his college sweetheart, a genuinely fair man who says things like "well-executed" in a voice that makes you want to lie down. Third place. Six years of third place. This year I was going to give him something to choke on his judging pencil over, and I want to tell you, that thought kept me up three nights cutting a brim shaped like a storm cloud.

I called my friend Aki, who is twenty-nine and makes hats out of things that should not be hats, and she came over with wine and looked at my storm cloud and said, "Oh my god, Dinah, it's unhinged."

"Is it too unhinged?" I asked, holding it up.

"It is exactly unhinged," she said, pointing her glass at me. "It's the most you thing you've ever made. What are the wires doing there?"

"They're lightning," I said. "Silver wire. It's meant to look like the moment right before the strike."

Aki put her wine down and looked at me properly, and she said, "Who are you and what have you done with Dinah Phlox?" and then she laughed and hugged me and made me promise not to chicken out and put a sensible ribbon on it. I promised. Mostly.

So the weekend of the championship comes, a Saturday in early June, hot enough that the canvas awnings over the stalls sagged and everyone's icing melted, and I hauled my storm cloud down the lane between the tomato ladies and the honey man, and I set up my little display space under the awning nearest the ruin wall. And that is when I saw it.

There was a display across the gravel path, in the shade of the crumbling stone, and on the table were hats, real hats, gorgeous ones, and one of them was a wide brim dyed the exact color of shallow sea water with what looked like tiny white coral branches growing up out of the crown. I stood there with my mouth open like an idiot, holding my own hat against my chest, and I thought, oh no, oh no, because that hat was better than mine. Not tidier. Better.

And then the man himself came around from behind the stall carrying a bucket of water, and I recognized him, because everybody in this market knows Angelo Parker, the coral fragment outplanter, the quiet one who spends his days kneeling in the shallows planting little pieces of coral the way a man tucks in seedlings, and who never talks to anybody except to say the price of things. He was thirty-two that summer, tall in a folded-over sort of way, and he set the bucket down, saw me staring, and gave me this small polite nod, like we were both just people at a market.

"That hat," I said, before my manners could catch up with me. "The coral one. How did you attach the branches?"

He studied me for a second, and then he said, "Wire and patience," like that was a whole answer.

"How long did it take?"

"Since February. Off and on." He went back to arranging things, and I stood there fuming, because he wasn't being rude, exactly, he just wasn't performing for me, and somehow that was worse. I had spent six weeks bleeding over a hat shaped like weather and this man had grown a reef out of his spare time and couldn't even be bothered to brag about it.

"Are you competing?" I asked. "In the championship?"

"Carlton asked me to enter," he said, straightening a felt cloche, one of mine, actually, I recognized my sage green, he'd bought it somewhere, which did something complicated to my stomach. "I mostly said yes for something to do."

Something to do. I will be plain with you, that sentence lit me up as a struck match does. I had been treating this championship like a coronation and this man was treating it like a Tuesday.

"Well," I said, "I'm entering too, and mine is going to win."

That got his attention. He looked up, and there was the first hint of something other than polite in his face, maybe amusement, maybe interest, hard to say. "The storm one?" he said. "The one you're holding like a shield?"

"It's not a shield," I said, too fast, and he almost smiled, and I hated him a little for it, and then Aki appeared at my elbow with two lemonades and said, "Ooh, who's this," and I said, "Nobody, he's my competition," and Angelo said, "Angelo," and put out his hand, and Aki shook it and looked between the two of us with the face of a woman doing arithmetic she enjoyed.

The morning went on, stalls filling up, judges wandering, Carlton Leeds in his straw boater making little notes, and I could not stop glancing across the gravel at that coral hat. Every time I looked, somebody else was looking at it too, a cluster of three ladies at one point, all leaning in, and I stood at my own table like a guard dog and thought, this is ridiculous, this is a hat championship, nobody dies at a hat championship.

Then I heard a crack.

It came from the corner of the ruin, near the broken bit of wall where the old junk collects, and I went over, because I'd noticed that corner earlier, there was a broken lyre back there, an actual lyre, all that was left of some marching glockenspiel band that disbanded decades ago, sitting in the weeds like a prop nobody claimed. And Angelo was there, crouched down, and in his hand was a piece of the lyre's arm that had come off in his grip, and I said, "You broke it," before I'd even thought.

"It was already broken," he said, standing up, holding the piece like evidence. "It's been broken for years. I was just looking at it."

"You were handling it. Carlton's had that lyre propped there for show since before I started competing, it's part of the ruin's whole look, and you just, you can't go around manhandling the exhibits."

"Dinah," he said, reading my name off my stall sign, and something about the way he said it, slow, like tasting it, made me angrier, "it is a broken instrument in a weed patch. I was looking at it. The arm was loose."

"It was not loose."

"It was loose in my hand, which is what loose means."

And I know how this sounds, two grown adults, twenty-eight and thirty-two, squabbling over a dead band's leftover lyre behind a honey stall, but I was riding a full head of competition steam and he was so calm, so infuriatingly calm, the way calm people always make you feel like the crazy one, and I jabbed a finger at him and said, "Just, keep your coral farmer hands off things that aren't yours," and he said, "Fine," and I said, "Fine," and neither of us moved, we just stood there in the weeds with the broken lyre between us and the judges' announcements drifting over the wall, and the air in that little corner had gone strange and tight, the way it does right before my lightning.

Which is when Aki's head appeared around the wall and she said, "They're judging the entries in ten minutes, you two, and honestly, what is happening back here?"

Aki looked from me to Angelo to the lyre piece in his hand and back to me, and I watched her decide not to ask any follow-up questions, which was the most restraint she had shown all year.

"Ten minutes," she said again, wiggling the lemonades. "Dinah, your storm hat needs straightening. Angelo, your reef needs whatever reefs need. Go."

She herded me back toward my stall with a hand between my shoulder blades, and once we were out of earshot of the corner she leaned in and said, "So that's the coral guy."

"That's the coral guy."

"He's tall."

"He's a menace to historic musical instruments, is what he is."

"Mm," Aki said, sipping her lemonade with her eyes on me over the rim of the cup, and I know that sound, I make that sound, that is a friend sound that means I am filing things away for later use. "Well. Look, I'm only going to say this once, and I'm saying it as a joke, mostly. If you're that worried about the coral hat, you could just, you know. Sabotage it a little. Snip a wire. Swap his dye. He'd never know until judging, and by then it's a mystery."

"Aki."

"I said it was a joke! Mostly a joke. Sixty percent a joke."

"I am not going to sabotage Angelo Parker's hat," I said, loud enough that I probably didn't need to, and then I did the thing you should never do in front of Aki Walsh, which was consider it, visibly, for a full four seconds, looking over at his stall where the sea-colored brim sat catching the light like it had been grown specifically to ruin my life. "Although," I said, and Aki made a noise like a kettle. "I'm joking," I said. "Mostly. Sixty percent."

"See, this is growth," she said. "This is you loosening up. I've been working on you for four years and all it took was one tall coral farmer."

"He outplants coral fragments, Aki, he is not a farmer, there are no tractors."

"Sea tractors," she said, waving her cup vaguely, "little underwater tractors, I assume, that's not the point. The point is you just said although out loud in public and I witnessed it, and honestly, Dinah, if you don't want to win this thing so bad it makes your teeth hurt, why have you been up since five with Geoffrey steaming brims like a woman possessed."

I did not have an answer to that, so I drank my lemonade. The thing was, and I could admit this to myself in the privacy of my own skull, I didn't want to sabotage anything. I wanted to beat him fair, with my storm hat, in front of everybody, and then watch his face. That was the fantasy. Not snipped wire. His face.

And then, because the universe has a sense of humor and it is a bad one, I happened to glance toward the corner of the ruin, and Angelo was standing there, half in the shade of the wall, with the lyre piece still in his hand and an expression on his face I could read even at forty feet, and the expression was: he had heard some or all of that. I watched him set the lyre piece down on the wall, carefully, deliberately, the way you put down a cup when you've decided not to throw it, and then he walked away around the back of the honey stall and out of sight.

"Oh no," Aki said, following my line of sight. "Oh, no, did he hear, how much did he hear?"

"Enough," I said, setting my cup down. "He heard the word sabotage and he heard although."

"Sixty percent is mostly," Aki said unhelpfully, and I was already moving.

I went around the back of the honey stall, past the walled garden gate where the daffodils had come up crooked last spring and somebody had left the crooked ones alone, out of some sentiment I'd never understood until possibly that minute, and found him near the far corner where the stones had tumbled down into a low heap. He was standing with his arms crossed, looking at the wall, not at me.

"Angelo."

"You don't like me," he said, without turning around. "That's fine. You don't have to like me. But I came here to show a hat, not to get my wire snipped in a weed patch, so if you've got some plan, just tell me now and I'll withdraw and we can both skip the theater."

"Nobody is snipping your wire," I said. "I was joking. Aki was joking. Sixty percent joking, which is a majority, which means it was a joke."

"Sixty percent," he repeated, and now he did turn around, and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the heat. "You know what I've been doing since February? Off and on, evenings, after work, when my hands are wrecked from the water?