She took the ribbon and the envelope with the prize money from Mr. CVY, who shook her hand with business-like formality and said, "Well done, Miss Dawson." "Thank you," she said. She turned to step down from the platform, and the crowd was there, the whole complicated crowd. And somewhere in the middle of it, Nathan was standing with Rose on one side and Emily on the other. And Rose was clapping with both hands together above her head.
The way small children clapped when they were completely committed to the clapping. And Emily was clapping too. And Nathan Nathan was not clapping. He was just looking at her with that look. The one she had no single word for quiet and old and settled and facing a direction it had chosen.
He gave her the nod, the one that meant something. She nodded back. And then the crowd moved, and the moment passed, and the festival went on around them, and Margaret stepped down from the platform, and Patricia Haynes was there with her eyes bright, saying, "I knew it. I knew it." And two farm wives she barely knew were asking her about the molasses edge, and could she share the recipe? and someone's child was tugging on her sleeve about something and the $40 was in the envelope in her hand and the ribbon was red and real and winter was going to be manageable and she was standing in the middle of all of it.
Margaret Dawson, 30 years old with flower probably still somewhere in her hair and she was not trying to be still. She let it move through her all of it. For once in her life she let it. What she didn't know yet, what she had no way of knowing, standing there in the noise and the cold and the relief was that Nathan Brooks had not gone home that evening to think about a woman who baked good pies. He had gone home to think about whether he had the right to ask for something he hadn't asked for in a very long time.
Whether a man who had spent 5 years learning to live without the best thing in his life had any business wanting something new. whether showing up every Sunday for two months with the same quiet intention had been enough, whether it was ever enough to earn the right to say what he had not yet said out loud to anyone, not even himself, until tonight. That was what was happening on the other side of town while Margaret banked her fire and counted $40 onto her kitchen table and let herself feel for the first time in a very long time like someone the world had decided was worth showing up for. She didn't know any of that yet. She just knew she was warm and the rent was covered and the ribbon was hanging on the nail by the door. And somewhere across Willow Creek, two little girls were going to sleep in a house where Sunday had a different meaning than it used to.
That was enough for now. That was more than enough. The Sunday after the harvest festival, Margaret arrived at the church market to find a line. Not a crowd exactly. Not the loose drifting kind of attention that sometimes gathered around a market table when the smells were ripe or the morning was slow.
A line seven people standing in an actual row in front of her table before she had finished setting up the cloth which she had never once in four months of Sundays had to deal with. And she stood there with a pie in each hand looking at these seven people and could not for a moment process what she was seeing. We heard about the sweet potato, said the first woman in line. Patricia Haynes told my husband. He doesn't even like pie, and he told me to come first thing.
I want whatever one, said the man behind her. Don't care what kind. Just the one that beat the Garfield woman's lemon chess because I've been hearing about that lemon chess for 3 years, and if something finally beat it, I want to know what it tastes like. Margaret sat down the pies. She looked at the line.