The Red Scarf I Kept in Cedar

The Rack

Saturday was the brightest day of the fall, fifty-two degrees and no wind. Main Street in Elmcrest on homecoming should be on a postage stamp: red brick fronts, striped awnings, pickups angled at the curb, folding chairs from one end to the other, children in the gutter with plastic bags held open like baby birds’ beaks.

Ned Lorentz drove the tractor. He is old Mr. Lorentz’s son, seventy himself, and when I saw that green hood I thought of his father’s truck on the pond road, and was nearly sick, the way you are when the past turns up wearing a different coat.

Marvene came down the sidewalk with a quilt over her arm. I helped her up by the elbow, and no farther.

The ride was eleven blocks. For the first two we did not speak. Her mother’s wedding-ring quilt lay folded in thirds on the bale between us, and the hay came through at the edges. Someone yelled that she looked like a million bucks and she said something sharp and funny back, and the crowd roared. I had forgotten that about her. She was always the quiet girl, and then she said something that landed like a thrown shoe.

At the Co-op corner I saw her stiffen.

I followed her eyes. A heavyset man in a ball cap and a tan work jacket stood at the curb with his arms crossed. He had a square jaw and wide-set gray eyes. Beside him stood a woman I took to be his wife, and a girl of about nineteen in a college sweatshirt. I have raised two daughters. I know what it looks like when a young woman wants to wave and has not been given leave.

“Is that him?” I said.

“That’s him.”

I did not look at the man in the ball cap as if he were an enemy. He was a son whose father had died last March and whose mother had curled her hair. I did not wave. I did not make a show. Gretchen Fiske had told me on the sidewalk before the parade that if I so much as touched that woman’s hand without leave she would push me off the rack herself. She said it with her chin up. It was the best speech I’d heard in years.

So I put my right hand down, open, on the quilt between us. Palm up. As you would hold a hand out to a nervous horse.