The coffee pot on the counter had a crack in the glass carafe that I never got around to fixing, and every time it brewed, it made a tiny clicking sound like a beetle behind the drywall. I stood in my kitchen on a Tuesday morning with the sun coming through the gingham curtains, holding a manila folder that smelled like twenty-two years of county ink and paper clips. My phone was sitting right there next to the butter dish.
The county clerk, a nice boy named Arthur whose mother I used to teach Sunday school with, had left a message at 9:14 asking if I was ready to sign off on the festival square permits like I always did.
Twenty-two years ago, the town square in this little corner outside Springfield looked like a ghost town. The windows of the dry goods store were papered over with yellowed newsprint, and the brick storefronts were crumbling down to the mortar. I sat at this exact laminate table with a black Bic pen and a spiral notebook, writing down names of apple orchards up in the hills and local carpenters who might build a pumpkin-weighing stage. There was no committee back then. There was just me, calling folks until my ear went numb, making sure we had enough hay bales to line the curbs.
The committee didn’t form until five years into it, when the crowds got too big for one person to handle the trash cleanup and the police barricades.
People joined because it looked fun. They liked wearing the orange ribbons and standing up on the wooden stage during the ribbon-cutting while the local paper took pictures. I never cared about the pictures. I cared about the liability insurance. I cared about making sure the health inspector didn’t shut down the church youth group’s cider booth because someone forgot to file the temporary food permit by August first.
For over two decades, every single piece of legal paper required to keep that festival alive sat in a drawer in my spare bedroom. When the insurance company sent the renewal notice every January with a premium increase, I wrote the check out of my own checking account and waited six months for the town to slowly reimburse me in dribs and drabs. Sandra didn’t know about the January checks. Sandra had only lived in town since the housing development went up behind the old mill.
The vote at the September meeting took maybe four minutes. Sandra stood up at the head of the fellowship hall with a neat little agenda printed on cardstock and a pink highlighter in her hand. She had her hair blown out into a stiff helmet and wore a blazer the color of a fresh cantaloupe. She didn’t look me in the eye when she called for the motion, but she didn’t have to. Barbara and Delores and the rest of them raised their hands without looking up from their clipboards.
Sandra smiled across the linoleum and said those words that kept replaying every time the coffee pot clicked. We’re going a fresher direction, and honestly, honey, you’re a little dated. The room went so quiet you could hear the traffic out on Route 4. Barbara stared straight down at her lap, smoothing her cardigan over her knees like she was trying to rub a stain out of the wool. I didn’t yell. I didn’t stand up and make a scene. I just closed my leather notebook, tucked it under my arm, and walked out the heavy double doors into the parking lot.
Three weeks passed before Arthur from the county offices called. In that time, Sandra and her new committee sent out glossy tri-fold brochures with turquoise lettering advertising the twenty-second annual harvest jubilee. They booked a bluegrass band from three counties over and promised all the food trucks their usual spots along Elm Street. They didn’t know that the food truck deposits were sitting in a separate business account under my Social Security number because the bank wouldn’t let a non-incorporated committee open a ledger without a designated individual as the guarantor.
When Arthur called, my hand hovered over the phone for a long second while the refrigerator hummed in the background. He sounded tired, the way he always did when county budget season rolled around. He asked if I was coming down to the annex on Thursday morning to sign the vendor permits and the municipal liability waiver for the square.
I looked down at the manila folder on the kitchen table. Inside were the carbon copies of every single permit from 2003 onward, signed in my own hand. I thought about Barbara staring at her knees in the fellowship hall. I thought about all those January mornings when the snow was piled six inches high against the back porch and I was on the phone with an insurance adjuster in Albany arguing over tent wind ratings.
I told Arthur no. I told him I wouldn’t be renewing anything this year.
He went quiet on the other end of the line for a second. He asked if I was feeling alright, or if someone else was taking over the paperwork. I told him nobody was taking it over, because nobody else knew how to talk to the county zoning board without getting their permits rejected by Friday afternoon.
By Friday morning, the phone started ringing off the hook. It wasn’t Arthur. It was Delores first, her voice all tight and breathless like she had been running up a hill. She asked if I heard about the county clerk’s office sending a certified stop-work letter to the committee headquarters. I told her I hadn’t heard a thing about it. Then Sandra called twice within twenty minutes, and when I let it go to voicemail, she left a message where her voice cracked right in the middle of asking me to check my email.
They showed up at my front door around two in the afternoon. I saw through the front window as Sandra’s cantaloupe-colored blazer came up the gravel walk, with Barbara trailing three steps behind her carrying a heavy canvas tote bag. They didn’t look fresh anymore. They looked like people who realized they had rented a hundred hay bales and three commercial generators for a street party that didn’t legally exist on paper.
I opened the front screen door about four inches, just enough to let the autumn air through without inviting them onto the porch. Sandra tried to smile, but her mouth looked stiff and pinched around the edges. She started talking about how there had been a misunderstanding at the committee meeting, and how everyone agreed that my institutional knowledge was simply irreplaceable.
I didn’t open the door any wider. I told them they could have the permits back whenever they wanted to figure out how to file them themselves. Sandra reached out a hand toward the screen like she wanted to touch the frame, then stopped herself and let her arm drop to her side. Barbara stood behind her, looking at the welcome mat just like she had looked at the floor in the fellowship hall.
You need to sign the transfer papers with the county clerk by tomorrow morning or the whole thing gets canceled, Sandra whispered, and for the first time since she took over the committee, she didn’t sound like she was running anything at all.
I told her where the county office was and what time Arthur opened the intake window. Then I closed the wooden door, locked the deadbolt with a clean, heavy click, and walked back to the kitchen to pour myself a fresh cup of coffee.
