The Fair

The Columbia County Fair ran for four days at the fairgrounds off Route 66, and by the last Saturday of August the grass in the parking field had been driven flat into a gray mat. There was a midway with a Ferris wheel that had been assembled in a day and would be gone in a day, a building labeled Agriculture & Home Arts where the pies were judged, and a grandstand with a corrugated roof where the dignitaries sat under a banner reading Columbia County: Growing Forward.

Wes carried Willa on his shoulders. She was two, and she had an opinion about the goats.

Maren walked with her hands in the pockets of a cardigan that was too warm for the day, because she had dressed for the photographs she was not going to take. The fair had the particular quality of an event that has been assembled for people who have nowhere else to go and are determined to have a good time. There was a smell of diesel and fried dough and, from somewhere behind the Home Arts building, manure, which the wind delivered in waves.

Grant Tully found them at the fence by the sheep pens.

He was a big man in his late forties with the flat, unhurried look of someone who has never once had to wait for a table. He had a farm supply business, a gravel pit, and eleven hundred acres, and he was in the middle of buying another four hundred along the creek for a thing he called, without embarrassment, a wellness campus, which in Harrow people pronounced with a sneer and then sold land to anyway. He had brought a colt to the clinic in the spring — a cut leg, nothing — and Wes had gone out to the farm twice because the colt was on a hill, and Grant had sent the clinic a ham at Christmas.

He said, "Doctor," and then, "and this is the one who was sick," and Willa put her face into Wes's hair, and Grant said, "She's shy," and Maren said, "She's not shy," and Grant looked at Maren for a moment longer than he had looked at either of the others and said, "No. I don't suppose she is."

Wes said he had to check the livestock schedule. This was not true; he had seen the livestock schedule. But a man in a blue polo shirt with a clipboard went past at that moment saying the 4-H judging had been moved up, and Wes — who could not resist a clipboard, who believed schedules, who had been raised to think that if a thing was written down it was therefore happening — said, "Willa wants to see the rabbits," and handed the child down and went.

Maren watched them go. The child's legs in their yellow shorts.

"You want to hear the speeches?" Grant said. "Up there you can actually hear them."

The grandstand had a press box.

It was a wooden platform at the top with a rail and two folding chairs and a view over the whole fairground: the midway, the livestock barns, the parking field with the cars in rows, and the green hill on the far side where the houses of people who had sold began. The PA system fed back, and somebody hit a microphone, and the feedback stopped, and a woman with a county title began to read the names of 4-H members who had shown cattle.

The thing about that platform — and Maren thought about this for years, and could never decide whether it was luck or method — was that from up there you could see everyone but no one could see you.

She stood at the rail. He stood behind her, not touching her, close enough that she could feel him decide not to touch her.

Below, the woman read: "...and for Grand Champion Showman, sponsored by the Columbia County Farm Bureau—"

Grant said, "You're not listening either."

She said, "No."

"—the recipient is—"

He said, "I watched you walk across the field."

Below: "—Cody Rusk."

Cody. The pharmacy boy, down at the fence line in a green jacket, going up to take a ribbon with the top of his neck pink. Maren watched him accept it — he held the ribbon like the prescription bottles, by the very top — and felt something in her that she would later identify, correctly, as the last of her pity.

"Columbia County," the microphone said, "has always been defined by the people who work the land. And as we look to the future of agriculture in this county—"

Grant said, "He's going to say innovation. They always say innovation."

"—we look to innovation—"

"There."

She laughed, and turned, and he was already looking at her, and the laugh went wrong in her throat because of the way he was looking at her, which was not hungry. Hungry would have been easier. Hungry she could have managed. He was looking at her the way a man looks at a horse he has decided he is going to buy: appraising, patient, and entirely without urgency, which she understood at once, and which frightened her, and which was the reason it worked.

"How long have you been unhappy?" he said.

She said, "I'm not."

"—and the youth programs that will carry our agricultural heritage into the next generation—"

He said, "All right." Not mocking. Agreeable. "How long have you been bored?"

The wind came up from the barns. Below, Cody Rusk was walking back toward the fence with his ribbon. The microphone moved on to the dairy association, and then to a man from the county legislature who wanted to talk about broadband.

She said, "Since I was eleven."

He said, "That's a long time."

And then — and here is the part she never told anybody, the part she went over in the dark for the next six weeks — he did not kiss her. He did not touch her. He said, "I'm going to go now, and I'm not going to call you, and I'm going to be at the diner on Tuesdays at seven because I have a standing thing with the assessor, and you're going to decide what you want to do about that." He looked at his phone, turned it face down on the rail. "That's not a game. It's better for both of us if it happens because you walked in."

The microphone said, "—thank you all for coming out, and God bless Columbia County."

Six weeks.

He was right about the weeks, and he was right that it was better. In the first week she thought about it in the car, at the sink, in the bath, in the ten minutes after Willa went down. In the second week she took the long way past the diner twice and did not go in. In the third week she went to an open house in Chatham for a house she did not want to buy, and walked through it alone, and stood in a bathroom with a skylight and thought: this is what it is to be a person with a skylight. In the fourth week she drove out past the Tully place on Route 22 and did not turn in. In the fifth week she said to Wes, "Thursday nights I have my class in the city," and he looked up from the sink and said, "I thought you finished that in December," and she said, "Second certificate. I signed up in August. Twelve weeks," and he said, "That's a long drive," and then, "All right," and she stood in the kitchen afterward with her hands flat on the counter, feeling, for the first time since the fair, the clean cold certainty of a person who has told a lie and gotten away with it.

In the sixth week she walked into the diner on a Tuesday at ten past seven.

He was in a booth with a man from the assessor's office. He did not look up. She sat at the counter and ordered coffee and drank it, and when the assessor left, Grant slid out of the booth, put money down, and sat down two stools away from her, and said, "Hi," and she said, "Hi," and he said, "I have to be at the farm in twenty minutes," and she said, "I know," and he said, "Do you have a car here," and she said, "Yes," and he said, "Follow me. If you change your mind at any point, just keep driving, and I'll never mention it."

She followed him eleven miles out Route 22, past the gravel pit, to a house on a rise with a barn that had been converted halfway and then stopped: new windows, no siding, a stack of drywall on the porch under a tarp.

Inside it smelled of cut pine and cold ash. There was a woodstove, a table, one chair, and a rifle case behind the door.

He said, "I'm not going to tell you it's beautiful."

She said, "Don't."

And after — the light through the new windows going orange, the tarp knocking on the porch in a wind that had come up while they were inside, the sound of her own heart doing something she had not felt since the dance at Sanger Hill — she lay with her face against his shoulder and understood, with a clarity that felt like a diagnosis, that she had not done this because she wanted him. She had done it because she had wanted to be a person who did this.

He drove her back to where she had left the car, at the turnout by the gravel pit, and she got in and drove home, and it was eleven-forty, and the house on Main Street was dark except for the lamp in the bay window that Wes left on for her always, and she went in and took off her shoes and put them away, and stood in the hallway for a moment holding the rail to the stairs, and then went up and got into bed beside a man who did not wake, and lay awake in the dark with her hands folded, entirely calm, entirely changed.