Chapter 4 of 7Wasn't Always So Fancy

The Coleman Family Farm bill sat on the shop counter on Main Street in Cascade Ridge, under the tax notice, and neither one was paid. Without hazelnuts there were no cardamom-rose truffles, and without truffles the tax bill would take the building before spring. Thea Quinn had one certified check left and no clear idea whose name belonged on it.

"It's Saturday," Fina said, coming up the back stairs with her coat already buttoned. "The market runs rain or shine, and we're out of nuts."

"I know what day it is."

"Do you, though?" Fina held up the clipboard. "The ledger has toasted hazelnuts down for the cardamom-rose, and the bins are down to dust."

Thea took the clipboard and ran her thumb down the column — cardamom, rosewater, hazelnuts toasted, cream by the jug. The finished ganache was there at the back of her mouth, rose first, cardamom settling under it like a warm floor, and not one spoonful possible without a farmer's permission.

"Mrs. Vogel settled up with Coleman at the end of every month," Fina said. "Then she stopped. That's the part I keep turning over."

"Then we'd better go ask him what we owe."

"Take your checkbook."

"I don't have a checkbook. I have one check."

"Oh. Wow." Fina wound her scarf and followed her down the stairs. "Also, Mr. Trent left a message. He needs to ask you something and he wouldn't say what."

Awnings dripped over the square at the top of Main Street, where a fiddler played for a hat and the bakery had its cider doughnuts out in the case.

Squash and sweet onions filled the slatted crates, huckleberry jam stood at eleven dollars a jar, and a tamale cart put out enough steam to fog the row.

"You're the one took the shop," the woman at the Daily Grind cart said, filling a cup before Thea had ordered anything. "Doreen."

"Thea."

"I heard." She slid the cup across. "Two sugars, right? Everybody in this town takes two sugars."

"Black, actually."

Doreen blinked, then let it go and leaned her elbows on the cart.

"Rios was in here Thursday telling anyone who'd listen about the trouble you had back east," she said. "Loud. Twice."

"That isn't mine to correct."

"No," Doreen said. "But it's mine to repeat."

The Coleman stand sat at the end of the row, where the tamale steam crossed the awning and thinned to nothing: plywood tables, cream in glass jugs, hazelnuts in open burlap.

"Mr. Coleman?"

"Yep."

"Thea Quinn. I have the shop."

"I know who you are." He wiped his hands on his apron. "Rios's man came by early, wanting all my cream and every nut I had, and he offered more than the shop has ever paid."

Rain ticked on the awning, and the tamale cart hissed.

"What did you tell him?"

"Nope."

Thea picked a hazelnut from the burlap and cracked it against her thumbnail. The skin came away papery, the kernel tight and pale, and the sweetness arrived after the butter, low and slow.

"You rack these and you never set them on the floor," she said. "I've worked with hazelnuts from Oregon to Piedmont, and these are as good as any of them."

"Yep."

"Annelise was lucky to have you."

He looked at the table instead of at her. "She knew quality." The steam drifted between them before he finished the thought. "Wasn't always so fancy about it."

"How do you mean?"

The fiddler worked through something old and slow at the far end of the square.

"How long did you supply her?"

"Long while."

"How long is that?"

"Before the market had a roof over it." He tipped his chin toward the sign. "She came to the farm herself in those days, in the truck, and she'd stand in the drying shed eating nuts out of the bin like a kid. Paid in cash out of a coffee can."

"What changed?"

He shrugged, which was not an answer, and then he gave her one anyway. "I'm owed for the last delivery. I'll say it plain, since you came down here to ask."

"Then I'll say it plain back. I'll pay you. I don't know when yet."

"People say that to me a lot."

"I know." She set the half hazelnut on the table between them. "It's on my list either way. Yours is the name at the top of it."

The half nut sat in his palm a moment before he swept it up and ate it. "Huh. You make the cardamom ones yet? The ones that smell like a garden after rain?"

"I made them once."

A slow nod, and then he turned to the woman behind her, and Thea understood she had been handed something she could not yet name.

"Miss Quinn."

Eleanor Penhaligon stood at the corner of the table, a canvas bag over her arm and a folded bill in her hand, her cardigan the color of a ripe plum.

"Mr. Coleman. The usual, please."

"Yep."

Eleanor turned to face her. "Your shop light was burning at midnight, and the historical society walks Main Street on Friday evenings, keeping a written record of what it sees."

"I'll turn it off."

The nod that answered her was small and unhurried.

"As I recall, Annelise kept that light on every night she was here. Every night of her time in Cascade Ridge."

"That's a kind thing to notice."

"It isn't kindness." She tucked the hazelnuts into her bag. "The festival committee has asked me to write the tribute this year, and I mean to write it accurately, from the record."

She paid, said good morning to Ben, and walked off toward the library with her bag swinging.

"She's been drafting that tribute since before I could read," Fina said, once the plum cardigan was out of earshot.

"Did you hear what he said about Mrs. Vogel? Not so fancy?"

"I heard it."

"What does it even mean?"

"I don't know yet," Thea said. "But it means something."

Back at the shop she paid Fina for the week and sent her home. Upstairs, the boxes she had been avoiding sat in the little front room over Main Street — Annelise Vogel's sweaters, a tin of buttons, receipts from a Seattle department store. The sorting asked nothing of her, which was why she had put it off.

The bookshelves were what remained, cookbooks cracked at the spine and stained with vanilla and grease, and she pulled them down one by one, looking for the paper markers Annelise liked to leave in the margins. Nothing. Then her fingers caught on a spine that didn't match — heavier, dark blue, jammed behind the dessert manuals as though somebody had hidden it in a hurry.

*Partnership Law: Formation, Dissolution and Liability.*

Thea carried it to the window. The pages were dog-eared so heavily the block had swollen, and the margins were full of ballpoint, hard strokes pressing through to the other side of the paper. Every passage was about dissolution, about liability, about what a partner may and may not do with the assets of a firm.

Beside each mark, in the same pressed hand, was a date. 1999, over and over, through the spring pages, the summer ones, the last chapter at the back.

At the bottom of the final page, under a paragraph about a partner withdrawing from a going concern, the pen had gone through the paper.

*Her name comes off everything.*

Thea closed the book and did not put it back on the shelf.