The Morning After the Fair

I woke up face down in a pillow that didn't smell like mine, under a quilt I didn't own, with one leg hanging off the mattress like I'd been mid-escape when sleep took me. It took a while for the room to come into focus. Boot prints. A belt rack. A mirror with a crack in the corner that I remembered putting my finger on at some point.

Lacey Sanders's bedroom. Well.

I'm forty-two. I've been the sheriff of Dry Creek for nine years, and I've been divorced for two, and in that whole stretch of time I have never once woken up in a bed I couldn't account for. Last night I could account for it just fine. That was the problem. Every piece of it came back in order, like a deposition.

The church fair. The pie booth, because Lacey and I have been feuding over pie ribbons for six years and neither of us is man enough to quit. The cider booth ran out of cider and started pouring something from an unlabeled jug. And then the argument behind the horse barn about whose turn it was to donate the champion ribbon money, and me saying something, and her saying something back, and then me kissing her. I started it. I've been a sheriff long enough to know you don't start things you can't finish, and yet.

Then the walk to the truck, where Lacey took one look at me, handed me a bottle of water, and took my keys, because she'd had two sips of that cider and I'd had three cups. At her door I said I wasn't going to do anything tonight I couldn't swear to in the morning, and she said then ask her again in the morning. We fell asleep on top of the quilt, boots off, me in my undershirt with my patrol shirt dropped on the floor. That was all. That was the whole crime.

And yet here I was, in her bed.

I lay there doing the math on my options. Option one, slip out before she got back. Except the bathroom door was open and the shower had already run, so she was up and moving and I'd be a woman caught halfway out a window, which is a worse look than staying. Option two, play dead. Option three, get up, find my boots, and have the conversation like an adult with a badge.

The bathroom door clicked and I chose option three mostly by accident, because I sat up to grab my shirt off the floor and then she was in the doorway.

Naked. Just flat out naked, toweling her hair, thirty-eight years old and built like she still throws hundred-pound feed bags around, which she does. She stopped in the doorway. She did not hurry to cover up, and I did not hurry to look away, and that told me both of us had decided something already.

"Why are you still here, Helga?"

"Working on it."

"The window was my plan A. You coming out of the bathroom kind of killed it."

She laughed, one short bark, and dropped the towel around her neck. "You're the sheriff. You don't have to climb out windows. People would've understood."

"People would've talked."

"People already talked. They talked at the fair. Prentiss saw us go behind the barn and he texted Olive before we were out of sight."

Of course he did. "Great."

"Sit down. You look like a suspect."

"I am a suspect."

"Of what?"

"Of staying for coffee when I should be gone."

She pulled on a robe, which was almost worse, honestly, because now she looked comfortable. She went to the kitchen and I heard the coffee pot and I found my shirt and put it on and followed the smell of it. Her kitchen was tidy the way a feed store is tidy, everything stacked on purpose. We'd known each other fourteen years, since she came to town at twenty-four and started arguing with everyone about everything, and in all that time we had never once been alone in a room with coffee.

"Mug's there," she said. "Black, right? You always strike me as black."

"Black. You're not?"

"I take it with enough sugar to qualify as dessert. Sue me."

I sat. She sat across from me, and for a while neither of us said anything worth writing down. The clock on her wall ticked. Somewhere a rooster with bad judgment announced dawn about three hours late.

"So," she said.

"So."

"Are we going to do the thing where you pretend last night was a mistake and I pretend I agree?"

"I hadn't planned the speech yet."

"Good. Skip it. It's a bad speech."

I turned the mug in my hands. "Fine. Then my honest position is I don't know what that was. I know I started it. I know you didn't stop me. I know I haven't kissed anybody new since Ray and I signed the papers, and I did not expect the first one to be you in a horse barn."

"Cider may have been a factor."

"A small factor. But that jug had no label, Lacey."

"Church women don't label their liquor, Helga. That's the tradition."

I laughed before I could stop myself. She watched me laugh like she was filing it under evidence.

"Here's my position," she said. "You kissed me. I kissed you back. We went to your truck, and then you said, and I quote, my place or yours, which was not subtle. Then we came here. None of that was an accident. I don't do accidents."

"No, you don't. You alphabetize your bolts."

"I do alphabetize my bolts."

"So what's the position?"

"The position is, I'm not looking for a relationship. I bought this store at twenty-eight and I've been married to it ever since. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make a nice story for Olive's diner wall."

"Nobody's asking you to."

"You might be, eventually. Women like you always are."

"Women like me. What does that mean?"

"Badge. Routine. A way you want things to look on paper."

That stung a little, mostly because it wasn't wrong about how I'd lived. "And women like you hide in a feed store so nobody gets a vote on your life. We're a matched set, apparently."

She smiled into her coffee, which I took as a point scored by nobody.

"Here's what I'll offer," she said. "You and me, informal. No strings, no schedule, nobody's business. You come by when you come by. I say yes or I say not tonight. Same for me at your place. If either of us gets bored or weird, we stop and go back to feuding over pie, which frankly I'd miss."

"Speak for yourself. My peach cobbler beat your pie last August."

"It did not, the judge was your cousin's..."

"He's not my cousin, he married in. That doesn't count as family, that counts as logistics."

"See, this is why we work," she said. "We fight about nothing and it's fun."

"Is that what last night was? Fun?"

"It was more than fun and you know it, or you'd have climbed that window."

I drank my coffee. It was good coffee, which annoyed me. Everything about her was annoyingly good at being exactly itself.

"Olive's going to have opinions," I said.

"Olive has wanted us to stop sniping at each other for a decade. She'll throw a party."

"The town..."

"The town can mind its own business. Half of them buy feed from me and the other half got tickets from you. Nobody's in a position to talk."

"Prentiss."

"Prentiss is neutralized by the fact that he owes me for three months of chicken scratch and knows I know it."

"That's not discretion, that's embarrassment."

"In this town that's the same thing."

I sat there and thought about it, the way I'd sat there thinking about it for six years of ribbon arguments. The truth was I'd been curious about Lacey Sanders for a lot longer than last night. The feud was the fun part of my month and I'd never once asked myself why. Now I had a pretty good answer and she was sitting across the table in a robe.

"One condition," I said.

"Name it."

"Dinner first. Next time. I don't care if it's here or the diner. I've known you fourteen years and I've never eaten a meal at your table. That's backwards."

She looked at me, then got up and opened the fridge like she was checking whether she could honor the condition. "There's eggs," she said. "And bacon from the Hendersons. Is breakfast now enough of a meal, or are you holding out for dinner?"

"That depends."

"On?"

"On whether breakfast comes with an answer to the question I haven't asked yet."

"Ask it."

"How long have you known you wanted me to kiss you?"

She cracked an egg against the bowl, deliberate, one clean hit. "Longer than you'd enjoy hearing," she said. "Eat your eggs."

"Why would I enjoy hearing it?"

"Because it makes you look slow, Helga. Nine years of watching you patrol past my store at nine-oh-five every morning and it took unlabeled cider to get you in this kitchen."

I put my fork down. "You watch my patrol truck pass?"

"Everyone in this town watches your patrol truck pass. It's the only interesting thing on schedule around here."

"That's not what you said. You said watching me."

She turned the eggs with a spatula, patient like someone who alphabetizes bolts for a living. "I said what I said."

"Lacey."

"Fine. Yes. I've been watching you for years. There's your answer, garnished with eggs." She slid a plate in front of me and sat down with her own. "You want to know why, or do you want to eat first?"

"Why."

"Because at town meetings you sit with your back straight and your notebook out, and you write down every dumb thing Deke Muller says like it's going on a legal record, and I used to sit there thinking, there is no way that woman is actually that uptight. Nobody is that uptight. It has to be a performance." She pointed her fork at me. "And I wanted to know what was under the performance."

"So you decided the way to find out was to get me tipsy behind a horse barn?"

"You did the kissing, sheriff. I just stood there being kissable."

I laughed into my coffee again, which was becoming a habit, and habits with Lacey Sanders felt dangerous. "For the record, I'm not usually that woman."

"You're not for the record. There's no record. That was the deal."

"Right." I ate some eggs. They were good, of course. "So how long have you been running this experiment?"

"Since before it was an experiment. Six years, maybe. Since the first ribbon fight."

"The pie thing started the ribbon fights."

"The pie thing started because you beat me with a cobbler entered in a pie category and I said so at the fair and you wrote me a verbal warning about disturbing the peace, which is the most sheriff thing anyone has ever done."

"It was a joke."

"It was a declaration of war and you know it. And somewhere around year two of the war I realized I looked forward to it more than I looked forward to anything else on the calendar." She shrugged. "That seemed worth investigating."

"So the feud was..."

"The feud was the only way I knew to get your attention without asking for it. Which is a stupid system. I don't recommend it."

I sat with that for a minute. Fourteen years I'd known this woman. Ten of them arguing, six of them arguing on purpose, apparently on her side anyway, and I'd driven past her store every morning at nine-oh-five thinking nothing at all, or thinking things I hadn't let myself finish thinking.

"I could have been investigating back," I said. "If anyone had told me."

"Who were they going to tell? You're the sheriff. People tell you about stolen bicycles."

We ate. The rooster crowed late again, somewhere out back, badly timed as ever. Lacey got up and refilled my coffee without asking, black, no sugar, and I watched her do it and thought about how her kitchen was tidy the way her store was tidy and how I'd never once been in either until last night.

"Can I say something that isn't a negotiation?" I asked.

"Those are my favorite kind."

"I don't do this. Informal arrangements. I married at twenty-three, I was married for seventeen years, I've been divorced for two, and in that time I have had exactly one date, with a woman from the county office, and it was terrible and we both pretended it never happened."

"What was wrong with her?"

"Nothing. She was fine. I was the problem. I spent the whole dinner being the sheriff." I turned my cup a quarter turn on the table. "I don't know how to be anything else in public."

"You were something else last night."

"Last night I was buzzed behind a horse barn."

"Last night you kissed me like you meant it, and I told you to ask me again in the morning. It's morning, Helga. You're sober and so am I."

I looked at her. She was looking back, steady, no armor on her face that I could see, and it occurred to me that I'd spent six years reading her across fairgrounds and meeting halls and I'd never once let myself look this long.

"Come here," I said. Then, because that was an order and I heard it come out like one, "If you want."

"I want." She stood up, unhurried, and crossed the kitchen, and instead of sitting in the chair beside me she sat on the edge of the table itself, which was either terrible manners or the most deliberate thing she'd done all morning. "There. Here I am."

I reached up slow, giving her every chance to move, and put my hand on the side of her neck. Her skin was warm and her pulse was going, which surprised me, because Lacey Sanders never seemed to have a pulse going anywhere. She didn't pull back. She tilted her head down toward me, one inch, an invitation in writing.

I kissed her.

It was nothing like the barn. The barn had been cider and dust and both of us pretending we hadn't planned it. This was slow, and quiet, and she kissed the way she did everything else, thorough and unhurried, like she had all morning and intended to use it. My thumb moved along her jaw and she made a small sound against my mouth and leaned in, one hand landing on my shoulder to steady herself.

When I pulled back she stayed close, forehead near mine.

"Well," she said. "That's confirmed, then."

"What's confirmed?"

"The performance theory. Underneath the notebook and the posture there's an actual person who kisses like she's got nowhere else to be." Her voice had gone lower, rougher around the edges, and I realized I'd never heard the store voice gone soft before. It was a whole different woman. Same words, different instrument.

"You're different like this," I said. "At the store you bark at people about chicken scratch."

"People need barking at about chicken scratch. It's got a ratio on the bag, Helga, they don't read the ratio." But she was smiling, and her hand was still on my shoulder, and she hadn't moved off the table.