Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 8: The festival
AMY
The Oakwood Summer Festival had been happening every August since before she was born.
It was not a large festival — it was a small-town Texas August festival, which meant a row of booths along Main Street selling things that were fried, a stage with a band that played country covers, a fair queen pageant that had been running since 1957 and which Amy had been unsuccessfully nominated for twice in her twenties, and a dance that ran from eight until whenever the town decided it was done.
She had been going every year since she was five.
This year she was going without a date, because the date she’d made three weeks ago with Tyler Hogan, who taught PE at the high school and was perfectly fine, had been canceled on Wednesday when Tyler called to say he had a family thing, which she suspected was code for having remembered the date of the festival and deciding it was too much commitment for four weeks of casual coffee. She didn’t blame Tyler. She also didn’t particularly care.
She put on the blue dress she’d worn to the Henderson wedding last spring and braided her hair back and drove herself to Main Street.
She was standing at the lemonade booth when Jake appeared at her left.
He said: *You’re alone.*
She said: *I’m between conversations.*
He said: *Your date.*
She said: *Family thing.* She said it without inflection. *Tyler Hogan. High school PE teacher.*
He said: *I know Tyler Hogan.*
She said: *Everyone knows Tyler Hogan.*
He said: *He’s an idiot.*
She looked at him.
He said: *I’ll walk with you.*
She said: *You were planning to be here alone?*
He said: *I was planning to do the minimum social requirement and leave. My mother said forty-five minutes minimum.*
She said: *That seems specific.*
He said: *She’s very specific about minimum social requirements.*
She handed him a lemonade and they walked down Main Street together, and it was — she searched for the word — easy. That was the word. She had been having easy with him for six weeks, the particular ease of two people who had known each other before they knew how to be complicated and who had found their way back to the easy the way you found your way back to something that was already in you.
He ate a funnel cake and complained about it and ate most of it.
She ran into Mrs. Callahan, who had her grandson in a stroller and was delighted to show everyone the grandson, and Jake stood next to her and looked at the grandson with the careful attention of a man who was not certain about infants but had decided to be respectful about them.
Mrs. Callahan said: *You two together?*
Amy said: *We grew up next door.*
Mrs. Callahan said: *I know that, sweetheart. That’s not what I asked.*
She smiled and moved on before Amy could answer, which was a practiced Callahan move.
Jake said: *What did she ask.*
Amy said: *She asked the thing everyone in this town has been asking since you got back.*
He said: *People are asking.*
She said: *People have always been asking. Since we were sixteen they’ve been asking.* She said it lightly. *It’s a small town.*
He was quiet.
The band started up on the stage — a cover of something she recognized from the nineties, the pedal steel guitar carrying over the evening air.
Jake said: *Dance?*
She looked at him.
He said: *They’re going to play the slow one eventually. Might as well be positioned.*
She said: *That’s very tactical.*
He said: *I’m a tactical person.*
She took his hand.
They found a space at the edge of the dance floor, where the stage lights didn’t quite reach and the crowd was thinner, and he put one hand on her waist and kept the other hand in hers and they danced.
He was — she noticed — careful at first. Not uncomfortable, but aware. The hypervigilance ran at the crowd and at the music and at the edges of the space, and she could feel it in the tension of the hand at her waist, the occasional half-turn to orient. She did not make it a thing. She kept her hand in his and moved when the music moved.
After a minute, he settled.
Not completely. Not the full exhale. But enough that she could feel the difference — the slight release in his shoulders, the way the hand at her waist became less managed and more present.
She said: *You used to dance better than this.*
He said: *You danced with me twice in high school.*
She said: *Both times you were better.*
He said: *I was showing off.*
She said: *For who.*
He said: *You.* He said it without thinking and then he looked at her and she could see him recalibrate.
She let it land.
She did not say anything about it.
He said: *I mean — we were at a dance. You were the person I was there with.*
She said: *I know.* She smiled. *You were showing off. You were good at it.*
He pulled her slightly closer and danced better.
She thought: *he always did know exactly what he was doing.*
The slow song came at 9:15 and she had been right about the positioning. The crowd thinned on the dance floor and the couples who wanted to were already there and she was already in his arms, which made the slow song a natural continuation instead of a decision.
His hand moved up slightly on her back.
She kept her cheek against his shoulder.
She could feel his heartbeat — slightly faster than resting, but not the wrong way. The present way. The aware-of-her way.
She thought: *six weeks.*
She thought: *I have been patient for twelve years. I can be patient for longer.*
She thought: *but something is changing.*
He said, against her hair: *I forgot how to do this.*
She said: *The dancing.*
He said: *All of it.* He paused. *The people and the music and just — being somewhere without a reason to be somewhere. Somewhere that’s just nice.*
She said: *It’s nice.*
He said: *Yeah.*
They danced until the song ended and then stood on the edge of the dance floor for a moment, not moving yet, her hand still in his.
Then the next song started — faster, country, the fiddle kicking in — and they both laughed and stepped back.
He kept her hand for one more second before he let it go.
She noticed.
She did not make it a thing.
They walked back to the lemonade booth and drank lemonade and watched the town dance, and at ten-fifteen he walked her to her car and said: *Thank you. For the festival.*
She said: *Thank you for the positioning strategy.*
He said: *Best use of tactical thinking in Oakwood.*
She laughed.
He looked at her laughing.
He said: *Amy.*
She said: *Mm.*
He said: *I—* He stopped. He looked at the parking lot. He said: *Drive safe.*
She said: *Always.*
She drove home.
She sat in her car in her driveway for three minutes and thought about his hand on her back and the way he’d said *you* and then recalibrated and the way he’d kept her hand for one extra second on the dance floor.
She thought: *something is changing.*
She thought: *I know.*
She went inside.
She was patient.
She was very good at patient.
But something was changing, and she knew what it was, and she was going to give it the time it needed, and when it was ready she was going to stop being patient about it.
She went to bed.
She slept.
She dreamed about dancing.
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