Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: Hayloft
Maura's POV
I sat in his lap in the red hut with the lake under us and his heart going against my breastbone.
I understood that he had been carrying that sentence since October.
His arms had gone tight around me.
He was waiting for me to get up, put on the bibs and tell him I'd said so in the flour room.
I took his face in my hands.
"The town votes on the clerk's seat on the second of March," I said. "At Town Meeting."
"I know."
"Ask me again that night."
He stared at me.
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a date," I said, and kissed him until the stove had to be fed.
The sugar-on-snow supper at the Plourde sugarhouse was six weeks later, on a Saturday so cold that the snow squeaked.
The sugarhouse stood on the hill above his uncle's farm, a long low shed with a steam vent running the length of the roof and a smell coming off it that you could taste from the road.
Inside, long boards were laid on sawhorses under bare bulbs, and the whole family sat along them.
There were aunts, a great-uncle, a row of cousins, two babies and a dog.
His uncle forked hot syrup out of the evaporator pan into a bucket and carried it down the table, and everyone drizzled it onto trays of packed snow.
It set in ribbons, chewy and amber.
You ate it with a plain doughnut and a dill pickle.
"The pickle is not optional," Yvonne informed me, and put one on my plate.
She sat on my left in her good coat, with a doughnut in one hand and her glasses pushed up, telling a cousin about the Grange.
She patted my knee under the table twice without looking.
Etienne sat on my right.
He did not touch me.
Under the table, his boot was against mine, steadily, for two hours.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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