She had learned it early and thoroughly. What snagged was the word marriage. The fact that Clara had said it at all. The fact that it was apparently something that required addressing that someone in this town had looked at Nathan Brooks walking to her table eight Sundays in a row and thought the word marriage was a relevant word to use. That had never occurred to Margaret as something anyone would think.
She didn't know how to feel about that. She was still not knowing how to feel about it four days later when she was at the general store picking up dried fruit for the next batch of pies. And she heard Nathan's name again this time from two men she didn't know well standing near the back of the store talking about the upcoming harvest festival and who was entering what. And one of them said, "I heard Brooks is going to have his girls in the children's baking contest Emily's been practicing all month." and the other one said, "That tracks man's been buying from the Dawson woman long enough. Reckon some of it's rubbed off on the girl."
Margaret picked up her dried cherries and her brown sugar and went to the counter and paid and walked out. She stood by her cart in the cold and breathed, rubbed off on the girl. She turned that over. Emily Brooks, 10 years old, had been practicing baking all month. And the only baking that child had been consistently exposed to at least secondhand through a cloth wrapped pie carried through the front door every Sunday morning was Margaret's.
She climbed into her cart and picked up the res and said to no one in particular, "Well," the horse didn't have an opinion. She drove home. That Saturday she made nine pies instead of eight. And the ninth one she made entirely for herself and she ate two slices with her morning coffee and felt no guilt about it at all. Some days called for that.
Some days the kindness you gave yourself was the only kindness you were going to get and you had to learn to receive it without apology. The following Sunday was different before it even started. She could feel it when she arrived at the market. something in the air, some shift in the quality of attention. The harvest festival was 3 weeks out and the whole town was working itself up about it, and there was a different energy faster and louder, and it made her own table feel both more exposed and for some reason more solid. Nathan came at his usual time.
He stopped at the table. He pointed at the peach. But before she could reach for it, Emily was there. Margaret had not seen her coming. She materialized at her father's side as suddenly as if she'd dropped from the sky 10 years old.
All angles and urgency, dark hair escaping its braid in several directions with Nathan's same careful eyes, but a completely different relationship to silence, which was to say she had none. "You're her," Emily said. You're the one who makes the pies, Emily. Nathan said with the tone of a father who had been through this before and knew it wasn't going to work. Papa said I could meet you, Emily said, which was either true or a creative interpretation of something else he had said.
She was looking at Margaret with absolute directness, the kind children had before they learned to soften it. He said, "You've been baking since you were little. Is that true?" since I was about your age, Margaret said. Maybe a little younger. Emily absorbed this with deep seriousness.