Wendell Cho, sixty-two, had spent thirty-one years appraising other people’s farmland, and he could tell a lie from a soil sample at forty paces. He was a forensic accountant for agricultural estates, a job that suited a man with a suspicious mind and a bad habit of correcting people mid-sentence. He drove a truck with a cracked dashboard and kept a tin of wintergreen lozenges in the console. He was divorced, twice, and he blamed neither wife. He blamed the wintergreen, mostly.
The county fair’s pie auction was the last place he wanted to be on a Friday night. But his sister had roped him into judging, and Wendell Cho did not say no to family. He stood behind a folding table in the grange hall, clipboard in hand, while the fluorescent lights buzzed like a trapped hornet.
Then Darlene Voss set her pie down.
She was fifty-eight, a cattle auctioneer from the eastern part of the county, a woman who could talk a heifer into a trailer. She wore a denim jacket with the sleeves shoved up and a silver ring on her thumb. Her hair was the color of good tobacco. She placed the pie—rhubarb, lattice crust, still steaming—directly in front of him, and her wrist brushed his knuckles.
“Careful,” she said. “It’s hot.”
Her eyes stayed on his a beat too long. Wendell felt the touch travel up his arm like a current through wet wire. He told himself it was the steam.
She leaned closer to adjust the pie plate, and he caught the smell of her: soap, hay, a trace of diesel. Her forearm was an inch from his. He could see the fine pale hairs there, the small scar near her elbow. His mouth went dry. He reached for a lozenge, thought better of it, and set his hand flat on the table instead.
“You’re the accountant,” she said. “The one who found the fraud at the Kessler place.”
“That was a matter of public record.”
“It was a matter of you being nosy.” She smiled. “I like nosy.”
The comment landed low in his chest. He was a man who had spent decades being told he was too much—too precise, too skeptical, too quick to correct. Here was a woman calling it a virtue. He felt a flush climb his neck and hated that he felt it.
“I’m also a decent judge of pie,” he said, too stiffly.
“Prove it.”
He tasted it. The rhubarb was tart enough to make his jaw ache, the crust shattering under his teeth. He nodded once, wrote a number, and slid the clipboard away.
“Ninety-four,” he said.
“Out of a hundred?”
“Out of a hundred.”
She tilted her head. “That’s the highest score you’ve given all night.”
“It’s the best pie.”
“It’s the best pie,” she repeated, mocking him gently. Then she touched his sleeve—just two fingers on the cuff, brief, deliberate. “You should come by the auction barn tomorrow. I’ll be selling. You can audit my numbers.”
He should have said no. He knew the shape of this feeling, and he knew it was a bad idea. She was loud and warm and entirely too much, and he was a man who liked his doors locked. But the two fingers were still on his sleeve, and her eyes were steady, and something in him that had been quiet for a long time sat up and paid attention.
“I’ll bring my calculator,” he said.
—
The auction barn smelled of sawdust and manure and hot coffee. Wendell stood at the back rail, and Darlene stood on the block in a chambray shirt, a microphone in her hand, her voice a low fast rhythm that made the buyers lean forward. She caught his eye between lots and held it. He felt the look land in his stomach. He looked at the floor. She laughed into the microphone, and the crowd laughed with her, and Wendell Cho understood he had been teased in front of fifty strangers.
Afterward, she found him by the coffee urn. The barn had emptied out. Dust hung in the light from the high windows. She stood close—closer than the room required—and he did not step back.
“You didn’t bring a calculator,” she said.
“I brought my judgment.”
“Is that what you call it?”
Her hand found his belt loop, a light tug, and the air went out of him. He was aware of everything: the grain of the rail against his back, the heat coming off her, the small sound of her boot shifting in the sawdust. His mind offered up objections—she’s too much, you’re too set in your ways, this will end badly—and his body ignored every one.
“I don’t do this,” he said.
“Neither do I.” She said it plainly, without apology. “But I’m going to.”
He looked at her mouth. He looked at her eyes. And then he reached out and closed the distance himself, because Wendell Cho had spent his whole life keeping a careful ledger, and for once he wanted an entry he couldn’t predict.
The kiss tasted of coffee and dust and the faint wintergreen he’d finally given up on. Her hands were rough and certain on his jaw, and he felt the last of his resistance fold like a cheap lawn chair.
—
They sat on the tailgate of his truck afterward, the stars coming out over the empty fairground, and she told him about her first husband and the farm she’d lost and the way she’d taught herself to talk fast so no one would talk over her. He told her about the correcting, the marriages, the long quiet evenings.
“You’re not too much,” she said.
“You don’t know that yet.”
“I’m a good judge.” She bumped her shoulder into his. “Prove me wrong.”
Wendell Cho laughed—really laughed, the kind that hurt his ribs—and reached for her hand. He did not correct her. For the first time in years, he didn’t want to.
