The one on stand 14 was the best of the four. The molasses edge was right. The crust was even. The filling had set exactly the way it needed to firm enough to hold. When you cut it soft enough to remember where it came from, her mother's recipe.
Her mother's hands threw hers in some way she couldn't entirely explain, but felt entirely clearly. She had done everything she could do. The three judges moved through the entry slowly and seriously. The way people moved when they understood they were being watched and wanted to get it right. Harlon Fitch was one of them.
Margaret had not known that until now, and she took note of it with a steadiness she was proud of. She was not going to spend the next hour managing her feelings about Harlon Fitch. She was going to stand near her entry and be still and let it be what it was. Judge Fitch did not look at her when he reached stand 14. The second judge, a woman named Mrs. Cvy, who ran the hotel in the next town over and was known for having standards about food that most restaurants did not survive, tasted the sweet potato and stopped.
She tasted it again. She said something to the third judge in a voice too low to carry. The third judge tasted it and nodded. Mrs. Cvy wrote something on her paper. They moved on.
Margaret breathed. The wait after the judging was 40 minutes, which was 40 minutes more than Margaret had capacity for, and she spent it walking the perimeter of the grounds with her hands in her pockets, and her mind doing the thing minds did when they had run out of ways to control the situation, going quiet, going inward, turning over things that weren't the immediate problem, because the immediate problem had no available action, and her hands needed something to hold. She thought about her mother saying, "You make beautiful things, Margaret. Don't you let anybody tell you different." She thought about Rose saying, "It tastes like sundaes."
She thought about Nathan standing in front of Harland Fitch with his hands at his sides and his face composed and his voice completely level and saying, "I'd hate for the Harvest Festival to get a reputation for reviewing the paperwork of some entrance and not others." She was walking past the east edge of the grounds when Emily appeared beside her, matching her pace with the easy presumption of a child who had decided they were walking together. "You're nervous again," Emily said. I told you I was nervous. You said nervous means you care about something.
Emily thought about this. "That's actually Papa's line. I borrowed it." "It's a good line," Margaret said. Emily walked beside her in silence for a moment, which was unusual enough that Margaret looked at her.
Emily was doing the thing that children did sometimes when they were about to say something they'd been thinking about longer than the conversation had been happening. Margaret waited. Rose cried last night, Emily said. Not about the festival, about She stopped, started again. She cried because she said she wished you could come for dinner.