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She sweeps off toward the pie tent with her pins flashing. I turn back to the brass cups and weigh the powder again, though I weighed it twice at noon. My hands need a job. They always do in the last half hour.

I teach safety three days a week at the Marion yard to twenty-two-year-olds who think they're immortal. I'm good at it. Dale was right about that. None of it changes the fact that my pulse is running too fast and the back of my neck is damp under the felt.

The Common is doing what it does on Founders' Day. Flags snap along the bandstand rail. The maples have gone to flame. A kid in a cow costume, possibly the same cow, is being chased by a smaller kid in a pumpkin. The air smells of cider donuts and woodsmoke and trampled leaves.

At the far end of the green, the Old Granary stands in its white clapboard dignity with the whole of its east wall painted in orchard. Forty feet of burnt sienna and gold, apple trees rolling down toward a creek. Tourists photograph it every weekend. It has a small brass plaque. The initials in the corner are H.B., and they're no longer small.

I check the vent. I check the primer. I run my thumb along the lanyard for fraying and find none, because I replaced it Thursday.

"You're doing the thing," Alfred says, to the worm.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you check what you've already checked."

"It's called procedure."

"It's called a man who's got his wife on his mind."

He holds the worm up to the light and squints down the length of it, entirely at peace. "I delivered mail to that porch for twenty years before you. Never once did I see a light on in the daytime. Funny how some things change."

I don't say anything. I don't have to.

Down the green, thin and sweet over the noise of the crowd, I hear it: Ella Fitzgerald, in B-flat, perfectly in tune.

I turn around.

She's coming through the crowd in the wine-red dress. The same one, the wrap with the soft knot at the waist, a little more worn at the seams from being loved. It moves with her over the full roll of her hips and the fall of her thighs. The October light finds the gold in her hair, which she's left down.

There's a stripe of cobalt across one knuckle. On her left hand, a plain gold band catches the sun. There's a matching one on mine. She's holding two paper cups out in front of her like a woman delivering sacred objects.

People step out of her way without knowing they're doing it. Half the town waves. She waves back with her elbow, since her hands are full.

"Look at you," Hollis says when she reaches me.

"Don't."

"A tricorn." She stops in front of me. Her eyes travel from the hat down to my boots and back up again, slowly, with a thoroughness I feel in the soles of my feet. "Some of us have been waiting for this."

"It's regulation."

"Is it regulation to look like that?"

"It's regulation to be on time."

"I'm on time." She hands me a cup. "Coffee. Black, one sugar, because you will never admit you take sugar."

"I don't take sugar."

"Ben. It's in the lid. I watched you stir it in on Tuesday and look around to see if anyone was watching."

I drink it. It's exactly right.

She moves, without a word, around to my right side. Close enough that her shoulder presses my arm. The tension in my jaw goes slack. Neither of us mentions it. We've stopped mentioning it. It's just where she stands now.

"How are you?" she asks, low, to the crowd, so no one else can hear.

"Fine."