Chapter 4: Baked Beans

The Grange hall on Saturday night held the whole town and eleven crockpots of baked beans.

Long tables ran the length of the room under strings of paper lanterns, and every folding chair had somebody's elbow on it.

I came in with a casserole I had bought at the grocery and put in my own dish, which fooled nobody.

"You're the clerk," said a woman at the door, and took the dish out of my hands.

I shook nine hands before I found a seat.

The woman across from me was on the selectboard.

She had white hair cut short and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had hired me over the phone in August.

She was cutting her cornbread into squares and asking whether I'd found the post office.

Etienne came down the table with a tray of rolls.

He had washed the flour out of his hair, and it was dark and damp and combed back with water.

He wore a clean blue shirt buttoned to the neck.

He set a basket in front of the selectboard woman and one in front of me.

He did not look at me, and that was the rule.

I looked at him enough for both of us.

He had rolled the sleeves to the elbow, and I watched a forearm move as he turned away.

At the end of the table, he stopped to refill the water pitcher, and then he sat down beside me.

I hadn't expected it.

He took the empty chair on my left, which was the last one in the hall.

His knee came to rest against my knee under the tablecloth.

It was a very small thing.

It stayed.

I ate a forkful of beans and tasted nothing.

I put my left hand down on the seat of my chair, an inch from his thigh, and I did not move it.

His knee pressed harder.

Etienne reached for the butter and his sleeve brushed my arm.

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